David Cordero

Strings validation with Rubustrings

Published on 29 Sep 2014

Rubustrings is a format validator for Localizable.string files.

How to use Rubustrings

It only needs the files to validate as arguments

./rubustrings Localizable.strings

Validators

Currently Rubustrings validates:

• The syntaxis of the strings file: Just the format of each line, (“key” = “value”);
• Special characters (\n, \r, %@, %d, %ld,…): It checks that the translation include the same set of them than the original string.
• Special characters at the beginning or at the end: If the original string begins or ends with a white space,\n or \r it tests that the translation also does.

Example

dcordero@silver:~$ ./rubustrings Localizable.strings
Processing file: "Localizable.strings"

✘ Beginning mismatch: " Tubasa" = "Tubasa";
✘ Invalid format: "bad format" = "because of a missing quote;
✘ Number of variables mismatch: "Web %@" = "Web";

✘ Some errors detected

dcordero@silver:~$ ./rubustrings Localizable.strings
Processing file: "Localizable.strings"
✓ Strings file validated succesfully

Future validators to include:

• Warning on untranslated strings.
• Warning if the translation is significatly larger than the original string.