Localizable.strings files.. in xcode4

Question

In xcode4, (I have used v4.0.1 until now and downloaded v4.0.2 yesterday.) I made Localizable.string files and compiled my project. (As you know, my source code uses NSLocal

Answer 1

Per Apple:

If you run into problems during testing and find that the functions and macros for retrieving strings are always returning the same key (as opposed to the translated value), run the /usr/bin/plutil tool on your strings file. A strings file is essentially a property-list file formatted in a special way. Running plutil with the -lint option can uncover hidden characters or other errors that are preventing strings from being retrieved correctly.

Fire up a console window, go into your project folder, and do:

/usr/bin/plutil -lint ja.lproj/Localizable.strings

(obviously replace the correct language folder name). This will tell you exactly where the problem is!

Answer 2

Related to this - take care when manually merging strings into Localizable.strings - I managed to copy/paste BOTH strings from a NSLocalizedString() macro, so that the Localizable.strings entry was in this form:

"KEY" = "STRING", @"COMMENT STRING COPIED ACROSS ALSO, IN ERROR";

The bit ,@"xxx" on building caused me to get the error:

Read failed: The data couldn't be read because it isn't in the correct format.

In this case doing a quick search on @" helped identify the places I'd done this.

Answer 3

With Xcode 10.1, one missing semicolon stops compilation with this error:

Localizable.strings: read failed: Couldn't parse property list because the input data was in an invalid format

BTW, you can find out if the error is general to your file (an encoding issue) or specific to one or more lines by temporarily removing most of the file content. You can then locate the problem by incrementally adding content back in until the error returns.

Answer 4

I had the same issue today after importing the localisations from Apple Notes and the cause was really subtle. The standard double quotes had been swapped with slanting double quotes.

Slanting double quote: ”

Standard double quote: "

Answer 5

Perhaps you have something like: "Bla"="bla";;

Note the duplicate ; symbol. If you have that, it will compile properly but will fail in run time.

Answer 6

I've been struggling with this same error, and ended up having a couple similar issues, but with different details. First off, even though it appears that Xcode's internal "builtin-copyStrings" tool should be able to handle either little-endian or big-endian UTF-16 files, it really only handles big endian. My theory is it's running some extra validation step (perhaps using the plutil command line utility) that didn't used to happen in Xcode 3, and that tool barfs on anything but big-endian UTF-16. Not entirely sure though.

The second trick is that you need to make sure your strings files are saved with no BOM (Byte Order Marker). I did some editing of my .strings files in BBEdit, which ended up saving a BOM to the file, and that also appears to make Xcode 4 have a conniption fit. Xcode itself doesn't appear to have any way to remove the BOM from the file, so this has to be done in a text editor such as BBEdit or TextWrangler which can do that for you.