It’s a package of Python code for manipulating Mac OS X/iOS .strings files, which has been written carefully to support all of the character escapes and Unicode characters you might wish to use.
To read a .strings file:
>>> from nslocalized import StringTable
>>> st = StringTable.read('/path/to/my/Localized.strings')
or to read the strings into an existing StringTable:
>>> st.read('/path/to/my/other/Localized.strings')
To write a new .strings file:
>>> st.write('/path/to/my/new/Localized.strings')
By default, that uses host-endian UTF-16, but you can specify the encoding:
>>> st.write('/path/to/my/new/Localized.strings', encoding='utf_8')
Each string is represented by a LocalizedString object; given the strings
file:
/* My important string */ "Very important" = "Très important";
in a StringTable st:
>>> ls = st.lookup('Very important')
>>> print ls.source
Very important
>>> print ls.target
Très important
>>> print ls.comment
My important string
You can also add entries to a StringTable with:
>>> st.store(LocalizedString('One', 'Uno'))
or with a comment:
>>> st.store(LocalizedString('MB', 'Mo', 'Megabytes'))
Finally, for simple access you can use the [] operator:
>>> st['GB'] = 'Go' >>> print st['MB'] Mo
In some cases you might want to load the string table without processing escapes. In that case, you can do:
>>> st = StringTable.read('/path/to/my/Localized.strings',
process_escapes=False)
which will read the table without any escape processing taking place. Obviously if you read a table in this form, you will also want to write it without escaping:
>>> st.write('/path/to/my/new/Localized.strings', escape_strings=False)