How to hack iphone locales

You may already seen out there some projects that translates the iPhone user interface to many different languages. Locale strings are stored in a totally different way though. Things like "Monday" and the Portuguese equivalent "Segunda-Feira" are stored in a ICU (International Components for Unicode) data file.

For 12 mondays I had to stand looking at "Segunda-Feira" being printed out of the bounds of iCal icon. Until today. I tried fgrep'ng the whole iPhone for the string "segunda" with no luck. Then I tried converting all the plists from binaries to XML and fgrep'ng again and still no luck. Doing some research I found that apple uses ICU on iPhone, which drove me to find our target: /usr/share/icu/icudt34l.dat. This is a 8.5MB file bundled with all the locales (timezones, region formats, etc.).

To start playing with it, the first thing we will need is obviously the file itself:

cd /tmp
ssh root@iPhone cp /usr/share/icu/icudt34l.dat /usr/share/icu/icudt34l.dat.bak
scp root@iPhone:/usr/share/icu/icudt34l.dat .

Now we need the ICU version 3.4 tools. Again, I don't like macports or fink so I had a bad time trying to compile it myself (remember I am on a Mac OS X Leopard). You have now the cake recipe:

cd /usr/src
wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/3.4.1/icu-3.4.1.tgz
tar -zxf icu-3.4.1.tgz
mv icu icu-3.4.1
cd icu-3.4.1/source

For some weird reason the configure script for darwin is broken, so I had to fix that with the following patch:

--- config/mh-darwin 2004-05-18 18:54:24.000000000 -0300
+++ config/mh-darwin.new 2008-03-27 23:48:45.000000000 -0300
@@ -58,6 +58,7 @@
@echo "generating dependency information for $<" @$(GEN_DEPS.c) $< > /dev/null
@mv $@ $@~
- @echo -n "$@ " > $@
@cat < $@~ >> $@
@-rm $@~

@@ -65,6 +66,7 @@
@echo "generating dependency information for $<" @$(GEN_DEPS.cc) $< >/dev/null
@mv $@ $@~
- @echo -n "$@ " > $@
@cat < $@~ >> $@
@-rm $@~

Now we can run configure:

./runConfigureICU MacOSX --disable-samples --disable-draft --disable-extras --disable-tracing --disable-tests

and make it:

make
sudo make install

I couldn't manage to get file from bin/ installed on my system, but anyway I wasn't really interested on going deeply on that. Heck, I want to get rid of that "Segunda-Feira" thing !

Lets extract our package now:

cd /tmp
/usr/src/icu-3.4.1/source/bin/decmn icudt34l.dat --pkgdata > out.lst
cd icudt34l

boom ! we got a lot of files... and look who is laying around:

-rw-r--r-- 1 igor wheel 51K Mar 28 00:14 pt.res
-rw-r--r-- 1 igor wheel 496B Mar 27 23:06 pt_BR.res
-rw-r--r-- 1 igor wheel 3.7K Mar 27 23:06 pt_PT.res

The file we want is pt.res, but its a binary file. I couldn't manage to convert it back to something readable but again I am more interested in the quickest solution possible. Just download the pt.txt here. Near to the end you will find the calendar day names. Edit accordingly. Important: remember to use UTF-8.

Now its time to generate our new resource:

/usr/src/icu-3.4.1/source/bin/genrb pt.txt

and re-package:

/usr/src/icu-3.4.1/source/bin/gencmn -v -n icudt34l 0 < ../out.lst

At this point you cross your fingers and hope this works... worked for me :)

scp icudt34l.dat root@iPhone:/usr/share/icu

reboot and you are all set.

If you can read Portuguese you might find this entry interesting as well. It describes the similar process of updating Mac OS X timezone. It makes use of `icupkg` though, that is not available on ICU version 3.4.