i18n resource file formats: RESX and RESW files

Next up in our blog series on localization resource file formats

Next up in our blog series on localization resource file formats are Windows-related formats. RESX files are used by programs developed with Microsoft’s .NET Framework. They store objects and strings for a program in an XML format. They may contain both plain text information as well as binary data, which is encoded as text within the XML tags.

RESW files are used by Microsoft Windows and Silverlight applications and contain strings that are used to localize the application for different languages and contexts. They are often used with XAML applications (such as Expression), which abstract the user interface strings to resource files.

Let’s have a closer look at how these files look like in terms of formatting:

Syntax of the RESW and RESX resource file format:

• Documents start with:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ENCODING"?>
  

  where ENCODING is the desired encoding

• Key-value pairs are nested within a <root> element and have this form:

  <data name="key" xml:space="preserve">
    <value>value</value>
  </data>
  

• Placeholder syntax is: {name}, where “name” can be a combination of non-white-space characters

• HTML comments preceding a key-value pair are treated as translation descriptions belonging to that pair, and can contain LingoChecks

• We use UTF-8 encoding for RESJSON resource file exports by default, but we also support other encodings our users might prefer:
  Export settings for resource files

Example of the RESX/RESW resource file format:

[gist: id=5344285]

Closing notes

Thanks for reading. Let us know if you have questions about using RESW or RESX resource files for your localization projects.

We also support newer files for Microsoft-related projects, such as Windows 8 or RT (see blog entry: Windows 8 resource file support).

Our series on localization file formats will be continued. We’ve previously covered .ini, .strings, and .properties files.

I am looking forward to your comments.