Is there a way to implement localisations within CLI apps?

Using Swift
1

Hello,

It looks like it's not possible to create a binary with localisation support for CLI apps. Are there plans to implement support for this natively, say like gettext? If not, is it possible to submit this as a request?

Thanks!

2

Out of curiosity, is it done anywhere else? I’ve never seen one before.

3

When SwiftPM’s localization support is released (SE‐0278), it will work for command line applications the same as anything else.

If you want to localize a command line tool before that comes out, you can use these packages of mine to do localization without separate resources:

Here is an example of a tool using it. (Try out the language switch in the top left.)

4

Thank you for the reply! I should have checked the proposals before I posted.

There is no urgency, I can wait. Your packages do look neat though.

5

Hello again. I've implemented localisations in my CLI tool, but it doesn't seem to work out-of-the-box. Normally I'd expect it to work like this:

NSLocalizedString("version ",
                  bundle: .module,
                  comment: "Version info") + "0.3",

But it requires me to add custom code to locate localisations like this:

let bundle = program.localizationBundle(
    forLanguage: Locale.current.languageCode ?? "en")
    
func localizationBundle(forLanguage language: String) -> Bundle? {
     if let path = Bundle.module.path(forResource: language,
                                      ofType: "lproj") {
         return Bundle(path: path)
     } else {
         return nil
     }
 }

And I need to implement the localised string like this:

NSLocalizedString("version ",
                  bundle: program.bundle ?? .module,
                  comment: "Version info") + "0.3",

Is this a Swift bug or am I doing something wrong?