Currently my text encoding of the Localizable.strings file is set to UTF-8. All my other localizable files are set to no explicit.
I want to change UTF-8 to No explicit, how is it possible ?
If you want to know, it's cause with xCode 10 this error appears
could not decode input file using specified encoding: Unicode (UTF-8), and the file contents appear to be encoded in Unicode (UTF-16)
You could try manually editing the project.pbxproj file to remove the fileEncoding = x for your Localizable.strings file?
To reset the Text-Encoding type. Select your language.string file:
Then select Text Encoding from right hand panel:
Update:
If you accidentally selected the Text-Encoding, then you have to reset it from project.pbxproj. To do this follow below steps:
Open package content of your Project.xcodeproj
Open project.pbxproj and search for your file-name and remove the fileEncoding = <encoding>; (for example: fileEncoding = 4;), and save the file.
If I copy something from textedit or web and paste it to localizable file it shows this compilation error. If I type those in localizable file it does not show any error. I am assuring you that I using the correct format and ';' in the file.
"New" = "New";
"In Progress" = "In Progress";
"Waiting" = "Waiting";
"Closed" = "Closed";
Use plutil from the Terminal:
you have to run it for each version of the localizable file. E.g
cd into your project root
cd eb.lproj - you can replace this with
any localisation you are working with.
plutil -lint Localizable.strings
When you run step 3, you will either be shown an error, telling you what is wrong with your file. Or you will be told the file is OK
Note that plutil output is bad, it seems it always says "Unexpected character at line 1" but above that output, it prints other stuff like missing semicolon on line 121, and that is the real error
For me, it was missing semi-colons. If you use a tool to generate .strings file, make sure there are no un-escaped quotes that may 'eat' the delimiting semi-colons.
pl < Localizable.strings
is better than plutil -lint Localizable.strings
Log will show something like this
2019-08-14 16:39:34.066 pl[21007:428513] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary on line 427. Parsing will be abandoned. Break on _CFPropertyListMissingSemicolon to debug.
2019-08-14 16:39:34.068 pl[21007:428513] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary on line 427. Parsing will be abandoned. Break on _CFPropertyListMissingSemicolon to debug.
2019-08-14 16:39:34.071 pl[21007:428513] *** Exception parsing ASCII property list: NSParseErrorException Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Unexpected character / at line 1" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Unexpected character / at line 1, kCFPropertyListOldStyleParsingError=Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Missing ';' on line 427" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Missing ';' on line 427}}
Fastest way to detect the line with the issued string is to :
right click the strings file and
then Open as/ASCII property list.
Xcode will immediately tell you in what line there's an error.
I know this question was asked long ago but my scenario and solution is little bit different.
Today I faced same issue but when I tried to check the issue using
plutil -lint Localizable.strings
I got OK status which means everything is fine, then I tried to find issue using
pl < Localizable.strings
But again I got file text printed with no error mentioned, then I tried a trick and it worked for me.
Right click on the Localizable.strings file
Then select option Open As option
Then select option ASCII Property List
That's it, XCode shows me the issue with line number and the issue was I had this DéjàVerified text as key on specified line, this helps me to identify and solve the issue, I hope it will save someone's time.
Cheers!
There can be multiple reasons for this:
Semicolon is missing at the end.
Multiple semicolons at the end.
" within the message which should be escaped by \".
Extra character after semicolon.
Invalid white space in the file.
Other invalid characters in the file.
Merge conflict characters in the file!
<<<<<<< HEAD, ======= and >>>>>>>.
Please note that plutil -lint Localizable.strings returned OK for point-2 & 7!
In my case, I was missing "=" between a string pair. Even plutil did not help me to spot the error line. I manually checked each string pair. :/
Your syntax seems to be fine, the only thing that I can see can "break" your file and cause this error is the quote character. Make sure to use the reqular one " and not in any other form like ″ for example.
Also make sure the strings file name is always Localizable.strings
I Had the same issue and i resolved it by commenting or removed unused strings in my Localizable.String file :)
I once had a similar error and it turned out that there was an URL in the middle of the file, like this:
// Some Comment 1
"Some key 1" = "Some value 1";
http://...whatever...
// Some Comment 2
"Some key 2" = "Some value 2";
When calling plutil -lint on that file the output was:
Unexpected character / at line 1
Well, the first character indeed was / as the file started with a comment but the problem resolved after removing the URL; or turning it into a comment which it actually should have been. Note that the URL was nowhere near the beginning of the strings file, it was about in the middle of a 6000 lines string file. I was only able to find it by browsing through commit history and always look at the changes.
if missing ";" at end of the all lines in Localizable.string file, this error can occur.
eg :-
"header_text" = "Current Language";
"change_language" = "Change Language";
"header_text" = "වත්මන් භාෂාව";
"change_language" = "භාෂාව වෙනස් කරන්න";
This may be because the translation file format is wrong.
You can download a mac software called Localizable.
This is the download link: https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/localizable-%E7%BF%BB%E8%AF%91%E6%96%87%E4%BB%B6%E5%B7%A5%E5%85%B7/id1268616588?mt=12,
you only need to drag Localizable.strings to the software and it will It is useful to tell you which line in the file may have a problem. It saved me a lot of time. Now I share it with you.
I hope it will be helpful to you.
It seems your info.plist is not in correct form . check it properly. I also had the same issue . I resolved it by modifying my info.plist.
I just had this experience:
external translator doing the work inside Visual Code or other text editors
Files not working and getting an error like this one: ( testing with plutil -lint )
Localizable.strings: Unexpected character " at line 1
CardRatingView.strings: Unexpected character / at line 2
I just created a new file within XCode and copy pasted all the file content and suddenly everything was working properly.
I guess something can go wrong / corrupting the file itself while working with other text editors.
If showing something like Unexpected character " at line 1, and it is the first string like "app_name"="Any Name"
Check that the file is UTF16
I ran into this issue, all my formatting was correct. Checking for illegal characters using plutil -lint Localizable.strings and using ruby libraries like "utf8_utils" also didn't work at finding the illegal characters. BUT when I pasted the Localizable.strings contents into the Terminal app while running irb, it did show me the weird characters.
"PercentComplete" = "%d procent gennemført";
Pasted into irb:
"PercentComplete"\U+FFC2\U+FFA0= "%d procent gennemf\U+FFC3\U+FFB8rt";
Then all I had to do was a regex replace to fix those weird white space characters: \U+FFC2\U+FFA0
Thanks to the plutil suggestion I understood that to make it work you have to delete also any \ or * as are not read as comments and, important, add a ; to the end of the file. Xcode 11.5.
If pl and plutil show no problems, check the file's encoding. I had a similar problem twice and in my case it was due to incorrect encoding, though I have no idea how it has been changed (I literally added a single line in the middle of the file in X-Code). Converting from UTF-16LE to UTF-16BE in some editor (I used Android Studio) fixed the problem.
For me I had an NSLocalizedString in my code that contained a string interpolation e.g. NSLocalizedString("\(product.price ?? "")per_month"). When I exported localisations this got added to my strings file, which was then in the wrong format. It threw me off because my strings file in Xcode looked fine, but actually the file gets updated as part of the export localisations process, and errors were creeping in there.
If anyone things they might be having the same issue try calling genstrings separately and seeing if the newly generated file is in the correct format. Make sure you save your strings first as this will overwrite your strings file : find ./ -name "*.swift" -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -SwiftUI -o en.lproj
This tool can help solve this problem, just select your localizable.strings file, it will help you find out which line format is wrong, it can save a lot of time
https://localizable.appdevtool.io/
In my case, I had one line with using ” instead of " and that breaks the file. My code editor did not detect this difference.
I was having the similar issue where i didn't escape the string value with backslash \ for one of my string's value.
Before:
"INVALID_NUMBER" = "It seems you're entering invalid number. Number should starts with "0" or "7"";
Updated:
"INVALID_NUMBER" = "It seems you're entering invalid number. Number should starts with \"0\" or \"7\"";
Backslashes are required when you want to display the quotation marks "
Please, have a quick look at here for How to include Quotation mark in strings
It seems like SVN is having some issue with this file. As it consider it to be a binary file. It is inserting a lot of non printable characters between each characters. I still couldn't find a proper solution. Just changing the Localizable.string files from production PC for avoiding any issue with it.
Update: Updating the SVN client (smartSVN) to the latest version solved the issue. It seems one of my colleague was using a older version. When he commited the change to localizable file it caused the error.
Whenever I try to 'Export For Internationalization', the exported file contains a weird hidden character, making it unparsable for XLIFF editors. The problem seemed to be in the original .string files, somehow the weird character was inserted in those files. I have since deleted the weird character but whenever I export it still sneaks into the xliff file. I tried cleaning and rebuilding the project, restarting Xcode... none of that seems to work.
Is Xcode somehow using a cached version of the 'bad' .strings file containing the bad character?
Using Xcode
If I try Editor > Export For Localization
I get:
/usr/bin/xmllint exited with status 1
Using Terminal
When I run it from Terminal like so:
xcodebuild -exportLocalizations -localizationPath
/Users/Kymer/Downloads/Wolf -project Wolf.xcodeproj -exportLanguage fr
I get the following errors:
parser error : attributes construct error
parser error : Couldn't find end of Start Tag trans-unit
parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value 19
parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value 19
parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch
parser error : invalid character in attribute value
parser error : attributes construct error
parser error : Couldn't find end of Start Tag
parser error : PCDATA invalid Char value
/Uxcodebuild: error: /usr/bin/xmllint exited with status 1
In both cases the exported xliff file contains the weird hidden character upon inspection with Sublime Text:
If I manually remove the bad characters the file is perfectly readable by xliff-editors but that's not a good long-term solution of course.
I found the problem: when exporting to an XLIFF file Xcode doesn't look at your .string files, it is all generated from the project itself (i.e. it looks at all NSLocalizedString calls and your storyboards). Which makes sense. I found the weird hidden character in one of my code files. Removing it from the source file fixed the export issue.
Easiest XLIFF workflow
I'll also mention this for future reference: the easiest way to add a new language to your project is to first use the command line:
cd to the your project and run:
xcodebuild -exportLocalizations -localizationPath <path> -project <projectname>.xcodeproj -exportLanguage <language code>
That creates a new XLIFF file and will correctly set the target language in the file (source language will be your base language). A translator can now easily add all necessary translations. Afterwards you can import the translated XLIFF file back into Xcode (select target and Editor > Import localizations). Xcode will then generate all necessary .string files.
Updating existing language: If you add new UI elements and want to update an existing localization language, you can simply export an existing localization (select target and Editor > Export for localization). That XLIFF file will contain all previous translations together with the new strings. A translator simply has to fill in the 'blank' lines. There's no need to touch the .string files yourself, because managing that manually is a pain (especially with the crazy Storyboard ID's).
I want to edit project.pbxproj straight up using command line (for CI server script)
what tools can allow me to do this?
I used to use PlistBuddy to edit the output Info.plist; however, what i really want to do is to edit this user defined field, which is used in multiple places, and i really don't want to have to hunt that down in every plist location
project.pbxproj is an old-style ASCII property list file, too. So you can use /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy to edit it.
Print some User-Defined key's value like this,
# Get the key A83311AA20DA4A80004B8C0E in your project.pbxproj
# LZD_NOTIFICATION_SERVICE_BUNDLE_ID is defined by me,
# Replace key paths with your own.
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'print :objects:A83311AA20DA4A80004B8C0E:buildSettings:LZD_NOTIFICATION_SERVICE_BUNDLE_ID' LAAppAdapter.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
Set its value like this,
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'set :objects:A83311AA20DA4A80004B8C0E:buildSettings:LZD_NOTIFICATION_SERVICE_BUNDLE_ID com.dawnsong.notification-service' LAAppAdapter.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
UPDATE
PlistBuddy will automatically convert project.pbxproj into a xml-format plist file since macOS Catalina (or some earlier version). It's better to move the setting item into xcconfig file instead since xcconfig is much smaller and simpler than project.pbxproj and not easy to make mistakes when editing with perl script.
I know this has been answered for a while, but since the original question is about tools supporting the manipulation of .pbxproj files, and many other people may be looking for the same information, here's how I do it. It took me quite a while to figure this out because I was very unfamiliar with Xcode when I started attempting this, so I hope this saves others the hours of grief I had to put in.
You can use the plutil command to transform the .pbxproj file from the legacy .plist format into an XML or JSON format you will be able to manipulate more easily. I'm using JSON. To do so, just run:
plutil -convert json project.pbxproj
This will convert the format of project.pbxproj, but be aware that -contrary to common sense- the output won't be another file with a JSON extention such as project.json. What will happen is that project.pbxproj will be converted to JSON format, but retain it's cryptic .pbxproj extension. So even though the file's format has been changed, Xcode will still pick it up and use it in its new JSON format.
Then you can change project.pbxproj with ease using any JSON manipulation tool of your choosing. I'm using Groovy's JsonSlurper class in a Groovy script.
Note I also explored the XML option, but I found the project.pbxproj file in XML format to be cumbersome to parse. The elements are not properly nested to allow for traversing the tree with ease. It's plagued with:
<key>someKey</key>
<dict>
<!--More elements which provide configuration for the key above-->
</dict>
So it's positional in nature. You have to look for the key element corresponding to the setting you want to manipulate and then jump to the dict element just after it. Which means you have to mount the children of each XML element into an array, in order to index them.
Here are 3 open-source tools which implement .pbxproj file editing:
https://github.com/CocoaPods/Xcodeproj (Ruby based)
https://github.com/apache/cordova-node-xcode (NodeJS based)
https://github.com/kronenthaler/mod-pbxproj (Python based)
Personally, I made the best experience with the NodeJS based tool. So far it has covered all our needs reliably.
In the following is listed an example javascript file update-project.js which sets the developer team ID, app entitlements, adds a GoogleService-Info.plist file to the project and checks it as part of the build target. Take it as an inspiration and adapt the scripts and its paths to your needs:
const fs = require('fs')
const xcode = require('xcode')
if (process.argv.length !== 3) {
console.error("Please pass the development team ID as the first argument")
process.exit(1)
}
const developmentTeamId = process.argv[2]
const path = 'ios/App/App.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj'
const project = xcode.project(path)
project.parse(error => {
const targetKey = project.findTargetKey('App')
const appGroupKey = project.findPBXGroupKey({path: 'App'})
project.addBuildProperty('CODE_SIGN_ENTITLEMENTS', 'App/App.entitlements')
project.addBuildProperty('DEVELOPMENT_TEAM', developmentTeamId)
project.addFile('App.entitlements', appGroupKey)
project.removeFile('GoogleService-Info.plist', appGroupKey)
const f = project.addFile('GoogleService-Info.plist', appGroupKey, {target: targetKey})
f.uuid = project.generateUuid()
project.addToPbxBuildFileSection(f)
project.addToPbxResourcesBuildPhase(f)
fs.writeFileSync(path, project.writeSync())
})
Above script can be executed with
yarn run update-project <arguments...>
given that update-project is registered in package.json:
{
...,
"scripts": {
...
"update-project": "node update-project.js"
},
...
}
I have problem with localization my addon. I followed this tutorial on Using Localized Strings in Preferences but I can't compile my addon because I use polish characters ć and others.
I've made locale folder and put there pl-PL.properties file with this content:
my_tag_title = Co robić?
and I got error:
Following locale file is not a valid UTF-8 file: C:\path\pl-PL.properties
'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe6 in position 22: invalid continuation byte"
Is there way to put special characters directly inside package.json?
How to solve this problem?
Make sure that the locale file is saved in UTF-8 format.