But resource bundles can’t help you in every scenario. I often find myself needing to construct a sentence with live data inserted. For this, the resource strings are less helpful. For example, how would you write:

"At " + time + ", you received a message from " + userName + "."

With resource strings, you would have to do something like

at=At
message=, you received a message from
period=.

Which completely negates the whole point of using resource bundles. What to do?

Token replacement

What I really wanted was a way to inject data into the string. I’ve seen this done by use of tokens in other languages like Objective-C so I thought I’d give it a try. The result was surprisingly lightweight.

I created this utility that lets you use tokens (delimited by % signs) that can be replaced by live data when you retrieve the resource. Using this class, the example above would look more like this:

receivedMessage=At %time%, you received a message from %userName%.

// then in your code
trace(ResourceStringUtil.getResoureceStringWithTokens("receivedMessage", {time: "11:49", userName: "Mims"}));

// displays
At 11:49, you received a message from Mims.

Here’s the source code Feel free to use it and modify it for your purposes.