xgettext with keyword that contains special characters

Question

How can keywords be escaped when passing the --keyword argument? We use static calls to fetch translations, i.e. in the form Language::getText('foo');

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 29 '13 at 21:42

4

I was looking for a solution to this as well; it looks (to my non-C-programming eyes) like xgettext uses colons as a separator internally. According to a comment in the code, "The characters between name and end should form a valid C identifier. A colon means an invalid parse in split_keywordspec()." So it's basically dumping anything with a colon in it as invalid.

answered Jul 29 '13 at 21:42

miken32

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Source in the *documentation*: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/xgettext-Invocation.html#Language-specific-options – caw Feb 01 '19 at 22:00

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 22 '16 at 11:10

I’m afraid you only have three options:

Write your own custom tool to extract strings from this sort of code.
Realize you are using a gettext library that has certain ways of doing thing and use it as it was intended to be used, i.e. with some sane, simple function or macro instead of a verbose Language::getText method call.
Add support for this to xgettext and submit a patch to GNU gettext project.

xgettext with keyword that contains special characters

2 Answers2