How to remove a language from String Catalog?

Question

I have accidentally added a new language in String Catalog by pressing a + button at the bottom.

However, there is no - button to remove it(like in Targets for example) and also there is nothing in attributes inspector.

If I select it and press back button on keyboard, it will not show a delete pop-up as it usually does in Xcode. Is there any way to delete it?

Soonsooner

Answer 1

I had this problem today, so I made a python script to modify the file. If you don't use python on your computer, you can use CodeSpaces to setup an area to run the code below.

---

• Open your catalog file as source code
• Simply Copy & Paste the JSON from your Localizable.xcstrings file to an input file (ie local_in.txt)
• Copy and paste the code below into a python file (ie delocalize.py)
• Make sure the .txt and .py files are in the same directory
• Then run the .py file (ie: python delocalize.py)
• You'll get an output file (ie: local_out.txt) that you can paste back to your Localizable.xcstrings file using FileManager and TextEdit

import json

def remove_localizations(input_filepath, output_filepath, languages_to_remove):

    with open(input_filepath, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:      # Load the JSON data from the file
        data = json.load(file)

    for string_key in list(data["strings"].keys()):                 # Remove specified languages from the 'strings' section
        string_data = data["strings"][string_key]
        if "localizations" in string_data:                          # Check if 'localizations' exists before trying to access it
            for lang in languages_to_remove:
                if lang in string_data["localizations"]:
                    del string_data["localizations"][lang]

    with open(output_filepath, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:     # Write the updated JSON data back to a file
        json.dump(data, file, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False)


input_filepath      = 'local_in.txt'        # Name of file with all languages       (ie: 'local_in.txt' file in the same directory, so use the relative path)
output_filepath     = 'local_out.txt'       # Name of file with the the new changes (ie: 'local_out.txt' the original or you can overwrite the file if you want)
languages_to_remove = ['de', 'fr']          # Languages to remove                   (in my case, I only wanted to keep the root ('en') language and 'jp')

# Call the function to remove the languages
remove_localizations(input_filepath, output_filepath, languages_to_remove)

Laue

Thank you very much, this saved me a lot of time. – Buttonball

It worked for me too, thanks ! – Nigritude

Answer 2

Looks like the only way is to go to the Project settings > Info and find the language. Press it and then hit the - button.

Soonsooner

This doesn't work for bundles (dynamic frameworks with localisation in) – Engross

Don't do this, it doesn't delete the language from the string catalog. – Schechinger

Answer 3

The Xcode team probably forgot that maybe developers need to remove languages so they didn't put a minus button.

Right click on the string catalog and open it as source code.

It is a JSON file that contains all the languages and their state.

Delete the key for the language that you want to remove:

(removing the selected text will remove Hungarian from the string catalog).

Schechinger

Nearly impossible to do when you have hundreds of translations. Wish Apple put all the same language strings together in a single block instead of separate languages for each string. – Comedown

When doing this it still doesn't remove the language from the catalog list – Gurkha

Answer 4

I had to do the same thing and unfortunately the accepted answer didn't work for me. The actual .xcstrings file still contained the translations. What I did was just to use the jq tool that manipulates json in a very easy manner. And the script that did the trick for me was this del(.strings | .[] | .localizations | .en). Just replace the last part with the language you would like to delete.

Pistoleer