gettext, how to handle homonyms?

Question

Using gettext

Single value

echo gettext( \"Hello, world!\\n\" );

Plurals

printf(ngett         


        

Answer 1

While trying to use the GNU xgettext utility to extract the strings from the source code I ran into some trouble with the pgettext() idea above.

At first it looks like it's going to work. Using the --keyword argument I can run the xgettext utility to extract these context and message strings from the test script:

echo pgettext('Letter','mail');
echo pgettext('Letter','character');

and get a .pot file with the expected output:

...
msgctxt "mail"
msgid "Letter"
msgstr ""

msgctxt "character"
msgid "Letter"
msgstr ""
...

But the PHP *gettext() functions don't allow me to pass the context strings - so I can't get the translated text.

Being able to use the GNU utilities makes things easier for me, so the solution for me was to use something like this:

function _c( $txt ) { return gettext( $txt ); }

echo "
", _c( "mail:Letter" ), "\n";
echo "
", _c( "character:Letter" ), "\n";

Now I run the xgettext utility

xgettext ... --keyword="_c:1" ...

against my test script. This generates a .pot file with simple msgid's that can be accessed via the PHP gettext() function:

...
msgid "mail:Letter"
...
msgid "character:Letter"
...

Next I copy the .pot template to the various LC_MESSAGE folders as a .po file and edit the translated texts:

...
msgid "mail:Letter"
msgstr "Russian outputs for Mail: \"письмо\""

msgid "character:Letter"
msgstr "Russian outputs for Letter of the Alphabet: \"буква\""
...

And my test script works:

...
Russian outputs for Mail: "письмо"

Russian outputs for Letter of the Alphabet: "буква" 
...

The documentation for xgettext is here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/xgettext-Invocation.html

(I'm still having a problem with poedit and "plural" text but that's another subject.)