bug in “django-admin.py makemessages” or xgettext call? -> “warning: unterminated string”

Question

django-admin.py makemessages dies with errors \"warning: unterminated string\" on cases where really long strings are wrapped:

string = \"some          


        

Answer 1

I can think of two possibilities: you might have an extra space after your backslash at the end of the line; or you might be somehow ending up with the wrong line-ending characters in your source (e.g. Windows-style when your Python is expecting Unix-style, thus disabling the backslashes).

Either way, I would take advantage of C-style automatic string concatenation:

>>> string = ("some text "
...           "more text "
...           "and even more")
>>> string
'some text more text and even more'

Alternatively, if you don't mind newlines ending up in there, use multi-line strings:

>>> string = """some text
...             more text
...             and even more"""

IMO these look much nicer, and are much less fragile when refactoring.

Does this help?