Is Localizable.strings required for the root language of an app? - iphone

As we're enabling our (English) application to be localized, we're replaced all in-line strings with NSLocalizedString() calls. Since all of our English strings are all there in-line with the code, e.g. NSLocalizedString(#"OK, #"OK button in a message box"), is there any reason we need the English version of Localizable.strings? When we try removing the strings from the English Localizable.strings, the program seems to work fine. Just wanted to double check if there was some side-effect to not having that around. Thanks, alex

One of the main points of using the NSLocalizedString() macro is so that your programming code can be parsed with the genstrings command-line tool to generate the corresponding Localizable.strings file(s) (see Resource Programming Guide: About the String-Loading Macros and Using the Genstrings Tool to Create Strings Files).
That Localizable.strings file then serves as a starting point for your translators, to use to translate to another language. Without that file to work with, your translators would basically need access to your source code in order to see all the strings you want to use (which kind of defeats the purpose).
Yes, your English version works fine right now, since if a localized version of the string you try to get in code –– for example, NSLocalizedString(#"OK", #"") –– cannot be found in a .strings file, it simply uses the #"OK" string that you passed in.
Another reason why you should likely be keeping the English Localizable.strings is that you should generally try to avoid using high-ASCII characters in your code, but should use the full range of available characters in your actual user interface. For example, you may not want to put the following characters in your code, but would want to use them in your user interface:
… (horizontal ellipsis) (U+2026)
“ (left double quotation mark) (U+201C)
” (right double quotation mark) (U+201D)
‘ (left single quotation mark) (U+2018)
’ (right single quotation mark) (U+2019)
So in code, you'd do something like this:
NSLocalizedString(#"Add Bookmark...", #"")
and then in your .strings file (which is UTF16, so this is fine):
"Add Bookmark..." = "Add Bookmark…";

It's not recommended to use the words as keys, if you want to change that Ok for something else and you have any other Localizable.strings, you will have to edit every single of them to update the Okkey.

Surely your translators will want your Localizable.strings file to work from. And want it to be ALL the strings.
(It is true that the system will fall back to the key, but relying on that seems like bad practice. And you'll find it more reliable to use proper punctuation in a Unicode file, which source code seldom is.)

Related

wxTextCtrl OSX mutated vowel

i am using wxMac 2.8 in non-unicode build. I try to read a file with mutated vowels "ü" to a wxtextctrl. When i do, the data gets interpreted as current encoding, but it is a multibyte string. I narrowed the problem down to this:
text_ctrl->Clear();
text_ctrl->SetValue("üüüäääööößßß");
This is the result:
üüüäääööößßß
Note that the character count has doubled - printing the string in gdb displays "\303\274" and similar per original char. Typing "ü" or similar into the textctrl is no problem. I tried various wxMBConv methods but the result is always the same. Is there a way to solve this?
Best regards,
If you use anything but 7 bit ASCII, you must use Unicode build of wxWidgets. Just do yourself a favour and switch to it. If you have too much existing code that was written for "ANSI" build of wxWidgets 2.8 and earlier and doesn't compile with Unicode build, use wxWidgets 2.9 instead where it will compile -- and work as intended.
It sounds like your text editor (for program source code) is in a different encoding from the running program.
Suppose for example that your text entry control and the rest of your program are (correctly) using UTF-8. Now if your text editor is using some other encoding, then a string that looks fine on screen will actually contain garbage bytes.
Assuming you are in a position to help create a pure-UTF8 world, then you should:
1) Encode UTF-8 directly into the string literals using escapes, e.g. "\303" or "\xc3". That's annoying to do, but it means you just don't have to worry about you text editor (or the editor settings of other developers).
2) Then check that the program is using UTF-8 everywhere.

How to use unicode characters in Eclipse File Search?

We have some XML file that contains some invalid character, and the program says neither which file it is, nor which line number or character offset. It would be a few seconds work to fix the problem if I could just search for exactly that character, but I cannot find how to express a Unicode character in the file search (or at least I assume so, since the search returns nothing).
Neither 0x1e nor \u001e seem to match anything.
[EDIT] I mean, I can still change the code, and eventually find which file it is by catching the Exception, and using some kind of script/tool to find where exactly the character is, but I do believe it should be possible to search with Unicode in Eclipse, and that is what I am asking in this question.
It may be a problem with the character encoding.
As you're going to need to perform a global / site-wide search to find the , you'll probably need to set the global text file encoding:
Preferences -> Workspace -> Text file encoding
This option may be under the 'General' section in Eclipse, depending on your setup and installed plugins etc.
Ensure that the encoding is set to UTF-8.
You will also need to escape the unicode character sequences, like so:
\u2665
(which I see you have tried)

How to convert unicode escape code to character in Objective C (on iPhone)

I have a string that contains unicode escape codes, eg. #"D\u017cem" (\u017c is code for ż). I would like to convert that string to the one containg actual characters. In the example that would be #"Dżem".
Is there any method in SDK or library that can do such replacement AND work on iPhone?
(Obviously I can do the replacement myself, changing characters one by one, but it is rather cumbersome)
According to Apple,
It is not safe is to include high-bit characters in your source code
Note that the "universal character name" \u017c is replaced at compile time with an implementation-defined value which in practice is the UTF8 representation, so the end result is the same as you would get if you (correctly) did the replacement you are talking about. If you're having a problem with some other source-processing tool, you might be better served by teaching that tool to recognize C99 universal character names.
I suggest to start using NSLocalizedString()
http://www.pushplay.net/2009/08/developing-localized-iphone-applications/
http://developer.apple.com

JMeter CSV Data Set is corrupting Japanese strings stored as proper UTF-8, I get Question Marks instead

I read in search terms from a simple text file to send to a search engine.
It works fine in English, but gives me ???? for any Japanese text.
Text with mixed English and Japanese does show the English text, so I know it's reading it.
What I'm seeing:
Input text:
Snow Leopard をインストールする場合、新しい
Turns into:
Snow Leopard ???????????????
This is in my POST field of an HTTP.
If I set JMeter to encode the data, it just puts in the percent sequence for question marks.
About the Data:
The CSV file is very simple in
structure.
There's only one field / one column,
which I name TERM, and later use as
${TERM}
I don't really need full CSV because it's only one string per line.
There's no commas or quotes.
It's UTF-8 and when I run the Unix "file" command on the file, it says UTF-8 text.
I've also verified UTF-8 in command line and graphical mode on two machines.
Interesting note:
An interesting coincidence that I noticed: if there are 15 Japanese characters then I get 15 question marks, so at some point it's being seen as full characters and not just bytes.
JMeter CSV Dataset Config:
Filename: japanese-searches.csv
File encoding: UTF-8 (also tried without)
Variable names: TERM
Delimiter: ,
Allow Quoted Data: False (I also tried True, different, but still wrong)
Recycle at EOF: True
Stop at EOF: False
Staring mode: All threads
A few things I've tried:
- Tried Allow quoted Data. It changed to other strange characters.
- Added -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
- Tried encoding the POST stage, but it just turned into a bunch of %nn for question marks
And I'm not sure how "debug" just after the each line of the CSV is read in. I think it's corrupted right away, but I'm not sure.
If it's only mangled when I reference it, then instead of ${TERM} perhaps there's some other "to bytes" function call. I'll start checking into that. I haven't done anything with the JMeter functions yet.
Edited Dec 24:
Tweaks:
Changed formatting and added bullet
points for more clarity.
Clarified that the file is UTF-8, and have verified that.
A new theory:
Is it possible that the Japanese characters are making it through, and the issue is that EVERY SINGLE place that shows them maps them to a "?" at DISPLAY TIME only. So even though I've checked in a bunch of places, they all have a display issue just in the UI?
Is there a way in JMeter to see the numeric value of a character or string? Actually, to tell JMeter to display the list of Unicode code points?
I'll look at my last log files... although I suppose even the server logs could mis-mapped the characters.
Also, perhaps when doing variable expansion inside of the text field that I POST, where I reference the ${TERM}, maybe at that point it also maps to question marks, but that the corruption happens at that later point. If that happened, AND it was mis-displayed in the UI, then it might lead to a false conclusion.
What I'd really like to do is pause JMeter after the first CSV record, just after that line is loaded, and look at it with a "data scope" or byte editor or something. Not sure if this is possible.
Found the issue, there was another place the UTF-8 had to be specified.
In the HTTP Request, to the right of the Method, you have to also set Content Encoding to UTF-8
Yes, in hindsight, this seems obvious, but there were a number of reasons I didn't think this was needed. Some of my incorrect assumptions might be helpful for others who are debugging, so here goes - I would have thought that:
1: Once text has made it into Java as Unicode, it stays as Unicode, and goes in and out by UTF-8. Obviously not in this case.
2: I sort of thought HTTP defaulted to UTF-8 unless you say otherwise, but maybe I'm just used to XML, but probably not a good practice to assume that, and maybe HTTP defaults to ISO-Latin1 or something, or even if there's a spec, maybe folks don't follow it.
3: And if I don't specific it, I'd think the "do no harm" approach would be to pass the characters on, and let the receiver on the other end deal with it. Wrong again!
(OK, so points 1, 2 and 3 overlap a bit)
4: Even though my HTTP Request POST, I did still try the Encode checkbox. I certainly thought that would have encoded it, but all I got was the repeating % hex for question marks, so seemed to me that the data was already corrupted at that point. Wrong again. I suspect WITHIN the HTTP phase, there's TWO character transitions, first from Unicode to whatever encoding it thinks you have, and THEN a second encoding into the %signs, and my data was mis-encoded at the first step.
5: And I would have thought JMeter would say something or warn, but from my reading, apparently it's not helpful in that respect. You can do logging or whatever.
And the "?" is Java's way of reporting a problem BY default, this started in the Java 1.4x timeframe. In my Java code I prefer to set encoding errors to report as an exception, but again, not the default, and not what JMeter does.
So I learned my lesson.
The HINT that the Unicode was at least starting out OK was that the number of question marks equaled the number of Japanese characters, instead of having 2 or 3 times as many question marks. If the length of "???" matches your Japanese (or Chinese) string, then Java DID see actual Unicode characters at some point along the journey. Whereas if you see 3 times as many ?'s as input text, then Java always saw them as bytes or ints or whatever, and NEVER as valid codepoints.
Came across this topic when searching for solution to use parameters from csv file that contained some columns written in Hebrew.
I used Excel 2007 to create a 1000 lines data for user registrations. The first and the last names had to be in Hebrew.
I exported the file to "Unicode text" file. It became tab delimited.
"Unicode Text" saves in UTF-16 LE (Little Endian), not in UTF-8. That is important.
I opened the result in Notepad++. I could see the Hebrew letters properly. The Notepad++ has the "Encoding" menu item, where you can check the encoding or change it. So I changed the Little Endian to UTF-8.
Then I replaced tabs with commas (just selected the tab and pasted it into the Find box.
The parameters were substituted ok, but after running the script I saw the following:
In the "View Results Tree" listener I opened the "Result" tab of the "Http Request".
The parameters were substituted, but the HTTP view tab (on the bottom) of the Request showed me some gibberish.
But when I looked at the Raw view, I saw that the request parameters actually contained strings like %D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%98%D7%94 that when taken in pairs (%D7 %A9) corersponded properly to Hebrew letters.
To my mind, the JMeter has a bug and can not properly display the unicode chars. But it sends (POSTs) them out ok.
Hope I am right and hope it will help someone.
You can try to use "SHIFT-JIS" in Content encoding (it's nearby Method selection). Then you should uncheck "Encode?" for parameter that included Japanese.
Hope it works you.

Apostrophe issue in RTF

I have a function within a custom CRM web application (old VB.Net circa 2003) that takes a set of fields from a database and merges them with palceholders in a set of RTF based template documents. These generate merged letters and documentation. The code essentially loops through each line of the RTF template file and replaces any instances of the placeholder values with text from a database record. The issue I'm having is that users have pasted a certain type of apostrophe into the web app (and therefore into the database) that is not rendering correctly in the resulting RTF file. It is rendering like this - ’.
I need a way to spot this invalid apostrophe in the code and replace it with a valid one. Unfortunately when I paste the invalid apostrophe into the Visual Studio editor it gets converted into the correct one. So I need another way to express this invalid apostrophe's value. Unfortunately I do not know a great deal about unicode and other encodings so I'm calling out for help with this.
Any ideas?
If you really just want to figure out what the character is you might want to try and paste it into a text editor like ultraedit. It has a hex mode that you can flip to to see the actual underlying bytes.
In order to do the replace once you've figured out the character you'd do something like this in Vb,
text.Replace(ChrW(2001), "'")
Note that you might not be able to figure it out easily using the text editor because it might also get mangled by paste from the clipboard. You might want to either print some debug of the ascii values from code. You can use the AscW function to do that.
I can't help but think that it may actually simply be a case of specifying the correct encoding to use when you write out the stream though. Assuming you're using a StreamWriter you can specify it on the constructor. I'm guessing you actually want ASCII given your requirement.
oWriter = New System.IO.StreamWriter(path, False, System.Text.Encoding.ASCII)
It looks like you probably want to encode characters out of the 8 bit range (>255).
You can do that using \uNNNN according to the wikipedia article.