Print NSLocalizedString key instead of value

Question

I need to print the keys of Localizable.strings in my App, instead of their values (for a debugging purpose). Is there a fast way to override the NSLocalizedString() method or redefine the macro, something like:

#define NSLocalizedString(key, comment) NSLocalizedString(key, key)

Answer 1

One option would be to export your app for localizations via Product Menu > Export Localizations within Xcode, then save the xcloc file to your Desktop.

After which you could use a python script to parse the inner xliff (xml) to find the file elements with original attributes which contain Localizable.strings and print the trans-unit's source element text within the body of them. Here's an example of a python script which should do it localizationKeys.py:

import sys
import os.path
from xml.etree import ElementTree as et
import argparse as ap
import re

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = ap.ArgumentParser()
    # filename argument ex: de.xliff
    parser.add_argument('filename', help="filename of the xliff to find keys ex:de.xliff")
    # verbose flag
    parser.add_argument('-v', '--verbose', action='store_true', default=False, help='Show all the output')
    args = parser.parse_args()
    if (os.path.isfile(args.filename)):
        tree = et.parse(args.filename)
        root = tree.getroot()
        match = re.match(r'\{.*\}', root.tag)
        ns = match.group(0) if match else ''
        files = root.findall(ns + 'file')
        for file in files:
            originalAttr = file.attrib['original']
            # find all files which contain Localizable.strings
            if originalAttr != None and 'Localizable.strings' in originalAttr:
                if args.verbose == True:
                    print("----- Localizations for file: " + originalAttr + " -----")
                # grab the body element
                bodyElement = file.find(ns + 'body')
                # get all the trans-units
                transUnits = bodyElement.findall(ns + 'trans-unit')
                for transUnit in transUnits:
                    # print all the source values (keys)
                    print(transUnit.find(ns + 'source').text)
    else:
        print("No file found with the specified name: " + args.filename)

Which you could then use as follows:

python3 localizationKeys.py en.xcloc/Localized\ Contents/en.xliff

Or if you'd prefer to print to to a file instead

python3 localizationKeys.py en.xcloc/Localized\ Contents/en.xliff > output.txt

This could almost definitely be more concise using xpath instead, but this is just what I came up with quickly.

Answer 2

Ok, this is how I obtained what I needed

// Overriding NSLocalizedString to print keys instead of values
#ifdef NSLocalizedString
#undef NSLocalizedString
#endif
#define NSLocalizedString(key, comment) key

In this way the App use the keys instead of the values