How to maintain/clean localized strings

Question

I have a rather huge strings file with about 600 strings in it. A couple of developers just dumped their strings into it for every module they wrote. There are a lot of strings there that are no longer used, or had been replaced. Also some more general error messages and such exist in several varieties and should be replaced by just one.

I went through 50 or so by select, copy-paste into search and see if they are still used in code... eclipse/lint does that for me, xcode 5 (still) doesnt seem to have that feature.

Now i found a plugin (LIN) that makes selecting/autocompleting of strings easier but i still have about 600 unchecked strings.

Only ONE language exists right now but a second is about to come, so i want to clean up the mess BEFORE that.

I have read

iphone - cleaning the Localizable.strings

but find the answer very impractical

/edit

What strategies are there that do the work and just show me the results ?! I feel like in the stone age of IDEs

Answer 1

I dont know if you still have this problem, but AppCode IDE shows you the strings which are not in use and lets you safe delete it (remove it from all your language files).