Your syntax seems to be fine, the only thing that I can see can "break" your file and cause this error is the quote character. Make sure to use the reqular one " and not in any other form like ″ for example.
you have to run it for each version of the localizable file. E.g
cd into your project root
cd eb.lproj - you can replace this with
any localisation you are working with.
plutil -lint Localizable.strings
When you run step 3, you will either be shown an error, telling you what is wrong with your file. Or you will be told the file is OK
Note that plutil output is bad, it seems it always says "Unexpected character at line 1" but above that output, it prints other stuff like missing semicolon on line 121, and that is the real error
It seems like SVN is having some issue with this file. As it consider it to be a binary file. It is inserting a lot of non printable characters between each characters. I still couldn't find a proper solution. Just changing the Localizable.string files from production PC for avoiding any issue with it.
Update: Updating the SVN client (smartSVN) to the latest version solved the issue. It seems one of my colleague was using a older version. When he commited the change to localizable file it caused the error.
For me, it was missing semi-colons. If you use a tool to generate .strings file, make sure there are no un-escaped quotes that may 'eat' the delimiting semi-colons.
I once had a similar error and it turned out that there was an URL in the middle of the file, like this:
// Some Comment 1
"Some key 1" = "Some value 1";
http://...whatever...
// Some Comment 2
"Some key 2" = "Some value 2";
When calling plutil -lint on that file the output was:
Unexpected character / at line 1
Well, the first character indeed was / as the file started with a comment but the problem resolved after removing the URL; or turning it into a comment which it actually should have been. Note that the URL was nowhere near the beginning of the strings file, it was about in the middle of a 6000 lines string file. I was only able to find it by browsing through commit history and always look at the changes.
I ran into this issue, all my formatting was correct. Checking for illegal characters using plutil -lint Localizable.strings and using ruby libraries like "utf8_utils" also didn't work at finding the illegal characters. BUT when I pasted the Localizable.strings contents into the Terminal app while running irb, it did show me the weird characters.
pl < Localizable.strings
is better than plutil -lint Localizable.strings
Log will show something like this
2019-08-14 16:39:34.066 pl[21007:428513] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary on line 427. Parsing will be abandoned. Break on _CFPropertyListMissingSemicolon to debug.
2019-08-14 16:39:34.068 pl[21007:428513] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary on line 427. Parsing will be abandoned. Break on _CFPropertyListMissingSemicolon to debug.
2019-08-14 16:39:34.071 pl[21007:428513] *** Exception parsing ASCII property list: NSParseErrorException Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Unexpected character / at line 1" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Unexpected character / at line 1, kCFPropertyListOldStyleParsingError=Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Missing ';' on line 427" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Missing ';' on line 427}}
Thanks to the plutil suggestion I understood that to make it work you have to delete also any \ or * as are not read as comments and, important, add a ; to the end of the file. Xcode 11.5.
I know this question was asked long ago but my scenario and solution is little bit different.
Today I faced same issue but when I tried to check the issue using
plutil -lint Localizable.strings
I got OK status which means everything is fine, then I tried to find issue using
pl < Localizable.strings
But again I got file text printed with no error mentioned, then I tried a trick and it worked for me.
Right click on the Localizable.strings file
Then select option Open As option
Then select option ASCII Property List
That's it, XCode shows me the issue with line number and the issue was I had this DéjàVerified text as key on specified line, this helps me to identify and solve the issue, I hope it will save someone's time.
If pl and plutil show no problems, check the file's encoding. I had a similar problem twice and in my case it was due to incorrect encoding, though I have no idea how it has been changed (I literally added a single line in the middle of the file in X-Code). Converting from UTF-16LE to UTF-16BE in some editor (I used Android Studio) fixed the problem.
you only need to drag Localizable.strings to the software and it will It is useful to tell you which line in the file may have a problem. It saved me a lot of time. Now I share it with you.
For me I had an NSLocalizedString in my code that contained a string interpolation e.g. NSLocalizedString("\(product.price ?? "")per_month"). When I exported localisations this got added to my strings file, which was then in the wrong format. It threw me off because my strings file in Xcode looked fine, but actually the file gets updated as part of the export localisations process, and errors were creeping in there.
If anyone things they might be having the same issue try calling genstrings separately and seeing if the newly generated file is in the correct format. Make sure you save your strings first as this will overwrite your strings file : find ./ -name "*.swift" -print0 | xargs -0 genstrings -SwiftUI -o en.lproj
This tool can help solve this problem, just select your localizable.strings file, it will help you find out which line format is wrong, it can save a lot of time