grep and UTF-8 - Red Leopard

TAG» bash, utf8

grep and UTF-8

I needed to look up the various strings Apple uses to name the iTunes Library. First I tried to get name from the iTunes resource bundle

echo "this won't work..."
echo "so don't even try it"

cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj
cat Localizable.strings | grep 'PrimaryPlaylistName'

But I quickly learned that grep doesn’t work on the strings file. Why? Because Apple string files are not UTF-8. They are UTF-16. Usually. But in this case they are. I wanted to iterate over the set of resource strings and extract just the string I wanted.

First I had to convert the file from UTF-16 to another format. Really, the only format that makes sense is UTF-8. After a bit of trial and error, I finally had my script just so.

#!/bin/bash

cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/

# file to look inside of
f='Localizable.strings'

# string to search for
s='PrimaryPlaylistName'

# look for directories of the form *.lproj
#
for d in `ls -1 | grep 'lproj'` ; do
  echo -n "${d}: "
  iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 ${d}/${f} | grep "${s}"
done

That’s it. That’s the script. Slap that puppy in a file (e.g., foo) and fire it off.

$ ./foo
Dutch.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Bibliotheek";
English.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Library";
French.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Bibliothèque";
German.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Mediathek";
Italian.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Libreria";
Japanese.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "ライブラリ";
Spanish.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Biblioteca";
da.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Bibliotek";
fi.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Kirjasto";
ko.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "보관함";
no.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Bibliotek";
pl.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Biblioteka";
pt.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Biblioteca";
pt_PT.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Biblioteca";
ru.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Медиатека";
sv.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "Bibliotek";
zh_CN.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "资料库";
zh_TW.lproj: "kMusicLibraryPrimaryPlaylistName" = "資料庫";

If I were better at command line perl, I could make a nice formatted table. That is, if I were better at perl.

CATEGORY: KellyBlog / Trackback URL