Stringer

Stringer takes the sting out of genstrings, by making it not overwriting your Localizations.strings file each time you run genstrings.

It wraps genstrings and adds some basic merging capabilities (add and remove keys).

Why?

When you run genstrings it goes through each of your specified .m files, looks for NSLocalizedString, parses out the key and comment, adds it to a Localizable.strings file.

Downside to this utility: it completely overwrites any changes you make to the Localizations.strings file (or if you give it the -a flag, it will at least append).

That's where stringer comes in, makes genstrings suck less.

Installation

Stringer requires ruby > 1.9.

The easiest way to use stringer at the moment is to add a Gemfile to the root of your project and add stringer to it, like so:

gem 'stringer'

Then execute:

$ bundle

Now you can create a Rakefile, and add these lines:

require "stringer"

desc "Run genstrings to update the Localizable.strings files"
task :localize do
  %w(en fr nl).each do |locale|
    Stringer.run(locale)
  end
end

Now you can update your Localizations.strings file by running:

rake localize

Which will output something like this:

Generating en.lproj
 - Added 3 keys (die.tijd;duvels;piet...)
 - Removed 1 key (dotter...)

Extras

Dynamic keys

Not all NSLocalizedString keys are created equally, in fact, being able to create keys in a loop a Good Thing, unfortunately genstrings won't pick these up. To avoid stringer from deleting these strings, start you key with a _ and Stringer won't touch them.

E.g.

for (NSString *key in @[@"one", @"two"]) {
  [[NSBundle mainBundle] localizedStringForKey:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"_sections.list.%@", key] value:@"" table:nil];
}

The future

0.1.0: Iron out bugs and missing options.

0.1.x: Add support for ruby 1.8.7 and up.

0.2.0: Add a bin, so the Rake-file shenanigans are no longer necessary.

0.3.0: Ditch the dependency genstrings and fetch strings ourselves.

...

1.0.0: Installed by default on OSX TomCat

The past

First "version" of stringer was a ruby script by @inferis, it grew out of client projects at 10to1 and turned into a gem on one saturday night.

Contributing

Fork it! Improve it! Test it! Rewrite it! (technology)

pjaspers/stringer