Converting Comments into Values in Localizable.strings Files Generated by Genstrings

I'm working on a Mac Cocoa project at the moment and had to deal with localization - something that has to be done but sure isn't fun. Localization isn't that hard though when using Cocoa: Enclose your localizable strings in a call to the NSLocalizedString macro and run genstrings over your files. When you have a string like @"I think this is a long string" somewhere in your source code and you want to localize it using NSLocalizedString, you might not want "I think this is a long string" to be the key in the strings file. What I do is this:

NSLocalizedString(@"LONG_STRING", @"I think this is a long string")

and then I run genstrings over my source and end up with this in the Localizable.strings file:

/* I think this is a long string */ "LONG_STRING" = "LONG_STRING";

I actually want "I think this is a long string" to be the value and not "LONG_STRING". That's why I wrote a small Python tool that takes care of this and uses the comments as the values. pyGenstrings coverts such files to look like this:

/* I think this is a long string */ "LONG_STRING" = "I think this is a long string";

That might come closer to what you want... Download pyGenstrings here: pyGenstrings.py

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