WiX Localization files (.wxl)

The Translate Toolkit is able to process WiX Localization files using the wxl2po converter.

WiX Localization (WiX) is the XML-based localization format used by the WiX Toolset for building Windows Installer packages. Files use the .wxl extension.

Format

A WXL file contains a WixLocalization root element that carries two important attributes:

  • Culture – the locale code for the target language, in lowercase, e.g. de-de, pt-br or cs-cz. This must be set for new files.

  • Codepage – the Windows code page or encoding identifier for the file (e.g. 1252 for Western European, 65001 for UTF-8). This is used both as a hint for determining the file encoding and as metadata for the MSI installer.

Translatable strings live in child elements of the root:

  • <String Id="key">text</String> – text as element content (WiX v3 style)

  • <String Id="key" Value="text" /> – text as Value attribute (WiX v4 style); other attributes on the element (e.g. Overridable) are preserved.

  • <UI Id="key" Text="text" … /> – translatable text in the Text attribute of a UI element.

UI elements without a Text attribute are non-translatable layout overrides that are preserved verbatim on round-trips.

Example (WiX v4):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>
<WixLocalization xmlns="http://wixtoolset.org/schemas/v4/wxl"
                 Culture="de-de" Codepage="1252">
  <String Id="WixUIBack" Overridable="yes" Value="&amp;Zurück" />
  <String Id="WixUICancel" Overridable="yes" Value="Abbrechen" />
  <UI Dialog="FilesInUse" Control="Retry" X="280" Width="80" />
</WixLocalization>

Example (WiX v3):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>
<WixLocalization xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/localization"
                 Culture="pt-br" Codepage="1252">
  <String Id="WixUIBack" Overridable="yes">&amp;Voltar</String>
  <String Id="WixUICancel">Cancelar</String>
</WixLocalization>

Encoding

WXL files often lack an explicit XML encoding declaration. When no declaration is present the toolkit defaults to windows-1252 for parsing (the most common Codepage in WXL files) and verifies against the Codepage attribute after the root element has been read, re-parsing with the correct encoding if necessary.

Files that carry a <?xml … encoding="…"?> declaration are parsed using the declared encoding directly.

References