It’s a package of Python code for manipulating Mac OS X/iOS .strings files, which has been written carefully to support all of the character escapes and Unicode characters you might wish to use.

To read a .strings file::

from nslocalized import StringTable st = StringTable.read('/path/to/my/Localized.strings')

or to read the strings into an existing StringTable::

st.read('/path/to/my/other/Localized.strings')

To write a new .strings file::

st.write('/path/to/my/new/Localized.strings')

By default, that uses host-endian UTF-16, but you can specify the encoding::

st.write('/path/to/my/new/Localized.strings', encoding='utf_8')

Each string is represented by a LocalizedString object; given the strings file::

/* My important string */ "Very important" = "Très important";

in a StringTable st::

ls = st.lookup('Very important') print ls.source Very important print ls.target Très important print ls.comment My important string

You can also add entries to a StringTable with::

st.store(LocalizedString('One', 'Uno'))

or with a comment::

st.store(LocalizedString('MB', 'Mo', 'Megabytes'))

Finally, for simple access you can use the [] operator::

st['GB'] = 'Go' print st['MB'] Mo

In some cases you might want to load the string table without processing escapes. In that case, you can do::

st = StringTable.read('/path/to/my/Localized.strings', process_escapes=False)

which will read the table without any escape processing taking place. Obviously if you read a table in this form, you will also want to write it without escaping::

st.write('/path/to/my/new/Localized.strings', escape_strings=False)