How do I put strings into stringtables in MFC? - visual-c++

I'm trying to localize a large MFC project where all the strings are hard-coded into the source code. (It was the easiest thing to do at the time, back before we had any idea we'd expand into other markets.) I've looked at localization tools, and invariably they say to put all the strings into the .rc file first, or just assume it has been done. Of the ones I've checked, appTranslator is the only one that even hints it may be a problem, and provides a couple of convenience functions to cut down on the wordiness of the resulting source code.
Does anybody have a better idea than going through hundreds of files manually, and making the occasional mistake along the way?
Is there some sort of product out there to help?
Does anybody have experience with doing this?

It is a tedious process to be sure. I participated in an effort like this many years ago. We did it manually. You can probably write some common code that makes the loading, checking, etc all pretty clean with minimal bloat.
I don't know of any products that will do it for you.
CStrings might be your friend - using the LoadString() member.
I would either derive from CString or write some other code that encapsulates default values (their current hard-coded values probably) and other error conditions and then use that in place of the hard-coded strings.
If you prefer not to use CString, then deriving from std::string and using the global LoadString() works fine too.
as for tools:
not sure they will work for your case:
http://www.modelmakertools.com/articles/hard-coded-strings.html
apparently this tool can find all the strings in your exe files:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Then you can search for them and replace.
I think writing a tool would be fairly straightforward - look for " character and then create an entry in an rc file that corresponds to the .cpp or .h file it came from. You will have a lot of culling to do, but it is a start. You can do a replace of the text, or insert comments, etc. You can use the line number and file name for the resource id/name in a #include.

I know it's too late but just for the search engine.
There is a feature of CString to initialize it from a resource ID.
CString((LPCTSTR)IDS_RESOURCE_ID)

Related

How to design plain tex data entry helpers such as autocompletion and syntax highlighting

There are some files like GEDCOM and ADIF that are plain text files, but many people tend to work with them through GUIs. Say I wanted to do data entry on these files directly without any GUI.There are a number of things that make this a little dangerous. Things like misspellings of necessary file-grammar, missing a necessary key, incorrect types for values, etc. There is also something to be said for the additional difficulty of having to type additional characters relative to a GUI.
From what I can tell by thinking about this for 15mins ;) is that having the following would make the job of plain text entry much easier.
A formatter. I think of something like Python's Black which is a CLI that can be run on a file. It can let users know of bad formatting and can provide fixes.
A linter. I think of flake8 to ensure the styling matches the standard.
Autocomplete. The file type examples I showed above have a dictionary of key words. To save on typing it would be nice to have autocomplete.
Syntax Highlighting. Having a way to know if my data entry is good or bad in real-time would be helpful.
It seems like requirements 1-2 could be solved by making a file specific CLIs that combs through plain text files.
Requirement 4 seems IDE specific. vim and vscode allow users to make syntax highlighting plugins. The problem is that this is normally solved by connecting to a language server. When you are not looking for a language server, but for key words and proper values in a plain text file how does let their IDE know that to look for? Is this just a regex soup solution or is there a better way?
Requirement 3 may also be IDE specific, but the same question applies as for requirement 4. When there is not a language server how can I let an IDE know what/how to autocomplete?
Any examples of plain text data entry made easier would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Is there any reason to reference UI element text in the strings.xml resource file rather than hard-coding in Android Studio?

It seems like it's simply more straightforward to hard-code the text values. In an event that these values should be changed it seems like it would be more logical to search for the relevant UI element in each activity's xml layout file rather than look through the entire strings.xml. Of course if you have certain UI elements across multiple activities that all share the same text then this might be an exception (like a back button for instance), but generally there doesn't seem to be much advantage to storing these in the strings.xml. Am I missing something?
I will give you two reasons;
1 - Avoid duplication: all of your strings in one place. also, you can use string value many times. when you want to change it, there is one place to do the change. that makes it easier to maintain.
2 - Multi-language support: if you want to translate your strings to another language you must have all the strings in Strings.xml
let me know if you need more clarifications.

notepad++ how to convert to typing assistant like?

I was using notepad++ to create a report and its taking a quite a while for me to type and do so.
Well i had tried a software called typing assistant it was really good(except for the money part :D).
TO the Point :
is there any way tat i can link a dict(text file of words) and use notepad ++ as typing assistant please tell me if so i
can speed my report.
Cause i am a programmer too so i really like the keyword completion and stuff .But is there a way to use it for text ?
already tried Phrase Express -.-:
Takes long and its kinda for macro text and text completion don't work tat fast for me to tab and complete
if there's a question in the form like mine link me to tat :
i searched it and i didn't get it
Yes, you can set up your own custom auto-complete dictionaries in notepad++. You need to create an xml file with your language name and put it under the plugins/APIs directory in notepad++. Of course this assumes you know how to write xml. There's a formal description of how to implement this here.
I've never tried to create an auto-complete dictionary for plain text files, so I'm not sure if it's possible, but I have successfully created them for user-defined languages, which you could also do if you can't get it to work with text files.
I'm not sure if this question is really a duplicate, but here is a very similar one, which may help you in your research.

creating tags for a script language for easy browsing in vim

I use ctags+Vim for a lot of my projects and I really like the ability to easily browse through large chunks of code quickly.
I am also using Stata, a statistical package, which has a script language. Even though you can have routines in the code, its code tends to be series of commands that perform data and statistics operations. And the code files can be very long. So I always find myself in need of a way to browse it efficiently.
Since I use Vim, I can use marks. But I was wondering if I could use ctags to do this. That is, I want to create a tag marker which (1) won't cause a problem when I run the script (2) easy to introduce to ctags.
Because it is supposed to not break the script, it needs to be a comment. In Stata, comment lines start with * and flow comments can be made by /* ..... */.
It would be great, for example, have sections in the code, marked by comments:
* Section: Data
And ctags picks up "Data Manipulation" as the tag. So I can see a list of sections and jump to them easily without the needs for creating marks.
Is there anyway to do this? I'd appreciate any comments.
You need a way to generate a tags database for your Stata files. The format is simple, see :help tags-file-format. The default tags program, Exuberant Ctags can be extended with regular expressions (--langmap, --regex); that probably only yields an approximate parsing for complex languages, but it should suffice for custom section marks; maybe you could even directly extract interesting language keywords.

How to detemine the file type in Linux?

If someone sends me a document (.pdf,.doc,.xls, ppt, .ogg, mp3, png, etc) without the extension, how can I determine the file type? The /usr/bin/file command doesn't always guess right or it simply says that I have a Microsoft Office document. I would like to know exactly so I can add the extension to the file name.
You can come up with your own rules by adding them to /etc/magic
man file for more details. It is tricky to always get these correct however, I have had reasonable success.
Try mimetype(1).
For Perl, look at File::MimeInfo.
Some of the other posters thus far appear to neglect a few things.
File::MimeInfo uses the same MimeInfo database used by 'file' to identify files. So That's unlikely to do anything different.
File::Type is likely to be interesting though, as it relies only on itself, but this leads to a comically long script full of 'if' statements. But this is, by its very nature, unlikely to cover things 'file' already doesn't cover.
The best you can do with unknown filetypes is try cracking them open with a hex-editor, or running them through 'strings' and seeing if you recognise anything. If you manage how to Identify a file, you may wish to go for File::Type as your solution because as far as I can make out, its at least easy to extend.
You can use the Perl module: File::Type

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