Strings-LE: Zero Hassle String Extraction

Pull every string value out of the current file in one keystroke
JSON/JSONC, YAML, CSV/TSV, TOML, INI, Environment files, and ten source languages

Useful? A star or rating is how other developers find it — ★ GitHub · ★ Open VSX · ★ Marketplace

What it does

Open a file, press Ctrl+Alt+E (Cmd+Alt+E on Mac), and every string value in the document lands in a new editor — deduplicate and sort it from there. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

• i18n prep — flatten locale files (JSON/YAML) into a clean list of translatable values
• Config review — see every string value in a TOML/INI/.env file at a glance
• CSV mining — pull one column, several, or all of them; stream very large files

Install

Use it from an AI agent

The same engine runs as an MCP server, so an agent can call it directly instead of you running a command.

extract_strings(content, format?, filename?, dedupe?, maxResults?)

Returns the values in document order, capped at 500 by default with meta.truncated. A format is optional — any unrecognised format falls back to quoted strings.

The server takes content and returns data — it reads no files and makes no network requests of its own. Published as string-le-mcp on npm and as io.github.nolindnaidoo/string-le in the MCP registry.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "string-le": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "string-le-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npm install -g string-le-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "string-le": { "command": "string-le-mcp" }
  }
}

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | npx -y string-le-mcp

Supported formats

Values are trimmed; empty values are dropped; keys are never extracted — one rule, shared by every extractor above. The fallback scan cannot see unquoted or multi-line strings, which is why the parsed formats and the source languages get real readers. Parse errors are silent unless string-le.showParseErrors is on.

The CLI

The same extraction runs from a terminal or a shell pipeline: a Rust CLI in crate/, sharing one corpus with the extension — crate/fixtures/ — so the two can never read a document differently.

string-le .                      # every string in the tree, as JSON
string-le --values src/          # just the values, one per line
string-le --dedupe --values .    # each distinct string once
string-le mcp                    # the same extraction over MCP on stdio

# the point of the whole thing:
string-le --values --dedupe src/ | sort > after.txt
diff before.txt after.txt        # what changed in the copy this release

The reader is not the author. The extension answers for the buffer you have open. Someone still has to read every user-visible string before a release — a QA lead, a compliance reviewer, a localisation owner — and they do not have the editor open, and several of them cannot be handed a checkout at all. The CLI puts the whole repository into one file they can read.

Source files are the main event there. A .ts or .py file is where the user-facing copy lives, so each language is read by its own literal syntax and anything still unrecognised falls through to quoted-string extraction rather than being refused.

Exit codes follow grep — 0 strings found, 1 none found, 2 the question was malformed — so finding nothing is an answer rather than an error.

Commands

Settings

Languages

Twelve languages besides English:

German · Spanish · French · Indonesian · Italian · Japanese · Korean · Portuguese (Brazil) · Russian · Ukrainian · Vietnamese · Chinese (Simplified)

Both halves are covered — the manifest (command titles, setting names and descriptions) and everything shown while the extension runs (notifications, the status bar, quick-picks and prompts). The extension follows VS Code's display language, so it matches whatever the editor is already set to; no setting of its own.

Privacy & security

• No network access. The extension never sends data anywhere. The telemetryEnabled setting only writes events to a local Output Channel you can inspect (String-LE).
• The MCP server holds the same line. It takes content as an argument and returns data: no filesystem access, no network calls, no telemetry. Your agent already has file-read tools, so duplicating them inside the server would add a path-traversal surface for no capability. check:mcp-bundle fails the build if the server ever imports something that could reach either.
• Error notifications redact home directories and credential-shaped fragments.

Documentation

Performance

Median of 7 runs after warmup, on Apple M5 Pro, 24 GB RAM, Node 24.3.0. Inputs are generated by scripts/benchmark.ts rather than checked in, so the sizes above are exactly what was measured. Reproduce with bun run benchmark.

These are machine-specific and are not asserted in CI — a benchmark that gates a build only tells you how busy the runner was.

Testing

306 test cases across 24 files, plus an integration suite that runs in a real VS Code extension host and an end-to-end test that installs the built .vsix into a clean profile.

Generated from a real run — coverage/coverage-summary.json and coverage/test-results.json — by scripts/coverage-readme.js; CI fails if this section drifts. Reproduce with bun run test:coverage, and the case count is the one vitest prints.

More from the LE family

Sixteen single-purpose tools for the work in front of every model. Each ships a Rust CLI and an MCP server. One page: letools.dev

Get it out

• String-LE — Extract every string in a codebase, with its position, so a person can read them
• Numbers-LE — Extract every hardcoded number in a codebase, so a person can check them
• Units-LE — Extract every quantity with its unit, normalized, and refuse the ambiguous ones by name
• Dates-LE — Extract every date and timestamp, and the exact instant each one resolves to
• IDs-LE — Extract every UUID, ULID, NanoID, ObjectId and Snowflake, and decode the time inside
• IPs-LE — Extract every IP address, CIDR block and MAC, normalized and classified by scope
• URLs-LE — Extract every URL in a codebase, with its protocol and exact position
• Paths-LE — Extract every file path in a codebase, and say whether it still points at anything
• Colors-LE — Extract every color in a codebase, and say which ones are not in your palette

Check it

• Regex-LE — Find every regex in a codebase, and report which can be driven into catastrophic backtracking
• Versions-LE — Find where one dependency is constrained differently across a repository's manifests
• i18n-LE — Identify the i18n library a project uses, then audit its catalogs by that library's rules
• Scrape-LE — Check whether a page is scrapeable before the scraper is written, and say when it cannot tell

Guard it

• Secrets-LE — Find hardcoded credentials in a codebase, and never print one into the report
• EnvSync-LE — Compare the dotenv files in a tree, and say which keys are missing from which
• Unicode-LE — Find the Unicode that hides meaning — bidi controls, invisibles, homoglyphs, mixed scripts

Each stands on its own: no shared crate, no published core. Where two of them agree, it is because the same answer was right twice.

Contact — nolindnaidoo.com · GitHub · LinkedIn

Also by nolindnaidoo

Rust — pixelcoords and pixelactions are one loop: pixelcoords answers where, pixelactions acts there. Their own tools, their own voice — not part of the LE family.

• pixelcoords — Freeze your screen, mark regions, get pixel-exact coordinates and crops pixelcoords.dev · crates.io · docs.rs
• pixelactions — Consume human-verified coordinates, perform the interaction, confirm it landed pixelactions.dev · crates.io · docs.rs

License

MIT © nolindnaidoo