Suppose you have a whiny co-worker who insists that all user-facing strings be localized. That’s what scripting tools are for, right? Specifically sed, in this case.
sed 's/@"[^"]*"/NSLocalizedString(&, nil)/g'
This little script will match NSStrings and replace them with a naive NSLocalizedString call. If you’re unfamiliar with sed (or even if you’re not), it matches regular expressions in an input and performs operations on them, usually substitution. In this case s is for “substitute”, @[^"]*" is the expression to match (if you’re unfamiliar with regular expressions, [^"]* means “any number of characters that are not a double quote”), and the NSLocalizedString bit is the replacement, with & meaning the previously matched string. g means apply it globally, ie, more than once. Let’s see what happens when we use it on our states array from the previous post:
$ echo '[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"Alabama", @"Alaska", …, nil]' | sed 's/@"[^"]*"/NSLocalizedString(&, nil)/g'
[NSArray arrayWithObjects:NSLocalizedString(@"Alabama", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Alaska", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Arizona", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Arkansas", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"California", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Colorado", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Connecticut", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Delaware", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Florida", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Georgia", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Hawaii", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Idaho", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Illinois", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Indiana", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Iowa", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Kansas", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Kentucky", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Louisiana", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Maine", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Maryland", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Massachusetts", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Michigan", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Minnesota", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Mississippi", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Missouri", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Montana", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Nebraska", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Nevada", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"New Hampshire", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"New Jersey", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"New Mexico", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"New York", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"North Carolina", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"North Dakota", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Ohio", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Oklahoma", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Oregon", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Pennsylvania", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Rhode Island", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"South Carolina", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"South Dakota", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Tennessee", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Texas", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Utah", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Vermont", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Virginia", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Washington", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"West Virginia", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Wisconsin", nil), NSLocalizedString(@"Wyoming", nil), nil]
Like magic! Now you can tell your coworker to suck it, sed solved all your problems. As it tends to do.
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