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