How to use genstrings across multiple directories?

Question

I have an directory, which has a lot of subdirectories. those subdirs sometimes even have subdirs. there are source files inside.

How could I use genstrings to go across all these dirs and subdirs?

Let's say I cd to my root dir in Terminal, and then I would type this:

genstrings -o en.lproj *.m

How could I tell it now to look into all these directories? Or would I have to add a lot of relative paths comma separated? how?

Oak

Answer 1

One method would be:

find ./ -name "*.m" -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

xargs is a nice chunk of shell-foo. It will take strings on standard in and convert them into arguments for the next function. This will populate your genstrings command with every .m file beneath the current directory.

This answer handels spaces in the used path so it is more robust. You should use it to avoid skipping files when processing your source files.

Edit: as said in the comments and in other answers, *.m should be quoted.

Package

This isn't working for me, but the answer from SEG below did work out ok (there's a backslash before *.m). – Rainer

Don't forget that when typing this in the shell, *.m needs to be quoted (i.e. find ./ -name "*.m" ...) because otherwise the shell will try to expand it first – Andreasandree

@Lance then you have no '.m' files in the current directory when you run it, and so the shell substitution is failing. Escaping the pattern will let this work regardless of the contents of the current directory. – Manisa

I found how to make it run on Swift file. just replace the *.m with *.swift should do it. It seems to parse swifts version of the command ie. NSLocalizedString("mykey", comment: "comment"); – Kenya

@Brian King Do you know if there's a possibility to also output something like /* File1.m */ as soon as a new file is accessed? In order to be able to better group the localized strings into files. – Transceiver

Answer 2

I don't know exactly why, but Brian's command didn't work for me. This did:

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

EDIT: Well, when I originally wrote this I was in a hurry and just needed something that worked. The issue that was occurring for me when using the accepted answer above was that "*.m" has to be quoted (and the curious can find an explanation as to why this is the case in the comments on Brian King's answer). I think that the best solution is to use that original answer with the appropriate bit quoted, which would then read:

find ./ -name "*.m" -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

I'm leaving my original reply intact above though, in case it still helps anybody for whatever reason.

Ing

Answer 3

This works for me:

find ./ -name \*.m -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

Thanks to Brian and Uberhamster.

Iveson

Answer 4

Swift

find ./ -name \*.swift -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

If you need the file in same folder

find ./ -name \*.swift -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o .

Cecum

Answer 5

Not sure if anyone noticed it or the option came later on, but now there is an -a option is genstrings. None of the above options worked for me. Below is my solution.

find ./ -name "*.m" -exec echo {} \; -exec genstrings -a -o en.lproj {} \;

This will also print the name of the files read.

Though above command works fine, it was not exactly for me, because in my project folder there are many files which are lying in folder but not included in xcode project. So what I did was, created a list of files used in my project by parsing pbxproj file. Added the list in filelist.txt, and fired below command

while read f; do find ./ -name "$f" -exec echo {} \; -exec genstrings -a -o en.lproj {} \; ; done < filelist.txt

Glamorous

This should be accepted)) It covers even sophisticated folder structure . Thanks @Ashishail – Lemures

Answer 6

Since no one has posted a solution with both Objective-C and Swift, I though I'd share how I do it.

find ./ -name "*.swift" -print0 -or -name "*.m" -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

By using this your localizable strings file will be replaced with strings from both the swift and objective-c files.

Edit: You need to cd to the directory with all your subdirectories.

Leff

Answer 7

I just added another path to the genstrings command, like this:

genstrings -o en.lproj *.m Classes/*.m

..and it worked out fine!

Poker

Works, but it doesn't check for duplicate entries from each specified directory. I got a duplicate entry in .strings file with same key and comment. I guess it works like -a flag. – Moyna

@Emmanuel that is correct. The -a flag doesn't append new strings-- it appends ALL strings to an existing Localizable.strings file. – Tody

Answer 8

I a have a lot of code in .mm files so i have to use:

find . -name \*.m -or -name \*.mm | xargs genstrings

or other variants, such as

find . -name \*.m -or -name \*.mm | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

Chromite

Answer 9

The following improves on the earlier answers, this will find both .h and .m files:

find ./ -name *.h -print0 -o -name *.m -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

Varga

Answer 10

I had problems generating the strings file for a folder structure where some of the folders had spaces in their names.

I found a nice solution on this site: http://riveroften.com/generate-localizable-strings-file-with-genstrings/

find . -name "*.m" -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o "en.lproj"

Ermina

Answer 11

To scan all the .m files: in root folder run this

genstrings ./**/*.m

Forlini

Answer 12

Try this

genstrings -o English.lproj ./Classes/*.m ./Classes/*.h ./Classes/subclass/*.m

If subfolders aren't too much, this will work perfectly.

Pastoral

Answer 13

find ./ -name "*.m" -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -o en.lproj

This will populate your genstrings command with every .m file to the current directory. Than create the NSLocalizedString() "key/context" in the Localizable.string file, which can be used any where in the project.

Fizzle