A comment on a bitbucket fork of Murky led me to “Automatically localize your nibs when building“, which suggests a great way to automate the hard developer-side stuff in localizing in Xcode–pulling the original strings from the XIB files and putting the translated strings back in. You absolutely should read the original blog post there, because I cannot adequately explain the big-picture part of the idea with a short quote.
My one complaint with the setup described is that the script for the “Run Script” build phase described there is a maintenance headache that I could do without. Here’s my solution: Create two new build targets, both of the “Shell Script” type–these are targets that just run a shell script, so they are created with only a “Run Script” build phase. I called my two new targets “Create/Update English .strings files” and “Create/Update l10n XIBs” but you can call them whatever you want.
In the “Create/Update English .strings files” target’s “Run Script” phase, the script is:
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for xibFile in "$PROJECT_DIR/English.lproj/"*.xib; do
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ibtool –generate-strings-file "${xibFile}.strings" "$xibFile"
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done
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exit 0
This uses ibtool to create a strings file for every XIB in the English localization (from foo.xib, foo.xib.strings will be created).
In the “Create/Update l10n XIBs” target’s “Run Script” phase, the script is:
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originalResourceDirectory="$PROJECT_DIR/English.lproj"
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for localizedDirectory in "$PROJECT_DIR/"*.lproj; do
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if [ localizedDirectory != originalResourceDirectory ]; then
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for xibFile in "${originalResourceDirectory}/"*.xib; do
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xibBaseName=$(basename "${xibFile}")
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ibtool –strings-file "${localizedDirectory}/${xibBaseName}.strings" \
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–write "${localizedDirectory}/${xibBaseName}" \
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"$xibFile"
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done
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fi
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done
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exit 0
This goes through every .lproj directory except English.lproj and uses ibtool to apply the .xib.strings files in those localizations to the XIB files in English.lproj.
By having these as two separate targets, they aren’t run every time I build and each part can be run on its own, on demand. By using the power of shell scripting, I avoid having to alter the scripts for every new localization or XIB.
