Doubly escaped strings about serge HOT 5 CLOSED

Can you please share and example of the .strings file that I could use to reproduce the problem? (You can trim it down to just one or two problematic lines.)

from serge.

Of course, thanks for the prompt response.

From the base strings file:

/* Sample strings with escapes */
"dateslist.nothingdue" = "Nothing due.";
"dateslist.nothingdue.today" = "Nothing due today.";

From the french translation:

/* Sample strings with escapes */
"dateslist.nothingdue" = "Rien n\'est dû.";
"dateslist.nothingdue.today" = "Rien n\'est dû aujourd\'hui.";

from serge.

I can confirm that if one has \' in the translation, in the generated file it will be presented as \\'.

According to Apple's documentation one doesn't need to escape apostrophes:

Using Special Characters in String Resources

Just as in C, some characters must be prefixed with a backslash before you can include them in the string. These characters include double quotation marks, the backslash character itself, and special control characters such as linefeed (\n) and carriage returns (\r).

So if the above it's true, then what Serge currently does is kind of expected: it detects a backslash not followed by any of the special characters, and escapes it by itself.

So I guess my next question is: why do you have apostrophes escaped, and can you try simply converting some \' to ' and see if this change has any effect on your application? If it doesn't, it just makes sense to convert these once through all resources.

from serge.

I also checked our own iOS and macOS resource files, and we have these strings that work just fine:

"'%@' is not a valid email address." = "'%@' n'est pas une adresse email valide.";

from serge.

That makes perfect sense, I just tested it and our app builds fine without the escape characters. I'm not certain why they were included in the file in the first place...

I will do as you suggest and clean up the strings on my end. Thanks for looking into this!

from serge.