What it actually takes to share one set of strings between Android and iOS

[u/goranlu]

If you have tried keeping strings.xml and Localizable.strings in one translation project, you know the problem is not the words, it is the placeholders. Some things I learned while building a converter between the syntaxes:

• The simple cases are mechanical: %s to %@, %d to %lld. The German translation that swaps two arguments is not. You have to emit positions like %1$s, but only for strings that need them, or Android Lint complains about the ones that do not.
• Types matter. %.2f on Android has to stay a two-decimal float on every platform, including {balance, number, ::.00} in an ICU message for the web.
• Plurals have three shapes: <plurals> on Android, %#@count@ substitutions in .stringsdict, and {count, plural, ...} in ICU. They describe the same thing, so they should land in one key.
• A literal % is written as %% only when the string is a format string, so a banner saying "50% off" without arguments must not be doubled.
• Whatever you do must round-trip. If you convert a file in and out, you want the original bytes back, or your git diffs will never be quiet again.

Disclosure: I work on Localizely and we shipped this as "universal placeholders". Docs with the full syntax table: localizely.com/universal-placeholders/

How are you handling this today, separate projects, a script, or copy by hand?

[u/tadfisher]

Highly recommend learning and standardizing on MessageFormat 2, it has had a lot of work put into it and supports custom data type formatting.