xgettext fails to extract tag attributes

Question

I'm stuck with xgettext missing tag attributes in HTML templates, e.g.:

xgettext --keyword=_ --language=Python -o - - <<EOF
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    % msg = _('A translatable string')
    <title>{{ _('Page title') }}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <a href="#" title="{{ _('title') }}">_('Link text')</a>
  </body>
</html>
EOF

returns

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2021-10-20 11:52+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"Language: \n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=CHARSET\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

#: standard input:4
msgid "A translatable string"
msgstr ""

#: standard input:5
msgid "Page title"
msgstr ""

#: standard input:8
msgid "Link text"
msgstr ""

where a's title attribute is skipped.

FWIW, the template language is Python bottle's SimpleTemplate Engine which is incompatible with standard pybabel.

(To tell the truth you'll get the same result -- i.e. tag attributes ignored -- using pybabel's javascript extractor, which I would rather use with the following babel.cfg)

[python: **/**.py]
[javascript: views/**.html]

Other tentative I did: use Jinja2 extractors which are incompatible with SimpleTemplate Engine's template inheritance syntax {{!base}}

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 22 '21 at 07:45

I ended up hacking jinja2.Environment initialization so to consider the {{!base}} command a comment.

[python: **/**.py]
[jinja2: views/**.html]
comment_start_string = {{!
comment_end_string = }}
silent=False

This way it won't find any translations in escaped prints — that's what {{! ... }} is for in SimpleTemplate Engine, should be a rare case you want to escape a translation text.

Also translations in python % and <% ... %> are somehow skipped, I haven't found a fix yet.

xgettext fails to extract tag attributes

1 Answers1