Issue with genstrings for Swift file

Question

genstrings works well to extract localizable content from .m file as,

find . -name \*.m | xargs genstrings -o en.lproj

But, not working for .swift file as,

find . -name \*.swift | xargs genstrings -o en.lproj

Answer 1

The genstrings tool works fine with swift as far as I am concerned. Here is my test:

// MyClass.swift
let message = NSLocalizedString("This is the test message.", comment: "Test")

then, in the folder with the class

# generate strings for all swift files (even in nested directories)
$ find . -name \*.swift | xargs genstrings -o .

# See results
$ cat Localizable.strings
/* Test */
"This is the test message." = "This is the test message.";
$

Answer 2

I believe genstrings works as intended, however Apple's xargs approach to generate strings from all your project's files is flawed and does not properly parse paths containing spaces.

That might be the reason why it's not working for you.

Try using the following:

find . -name \*.swift | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 genstrings -o .

Answer 3

We wrote a command line tool that works for Swift files and merges the result of apples genstrings tool. It allows for key and value in NSLocalizedString

https://github.com/KeepSafe/genstrings_swift