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Pygettext: Support translator comments #130057
Description
Feature or enhancement
Proposal:
Most gettext extraction tools such as xgettext or pybabel allow one to extract additional comments written by
the programmer which are meant to be read by the translator. These are prefixed with #. in the PO file.
The comments typically look something like this:
# i18n: Translator comment
_('foo')This can be extracted with e.g. xgettext using xgettext --add-comments=i18n:
#. i18n: Translator comment
msgid "foo"
msgstr ""Since this is a pretty widely used feature I propose we add this to pygettext as well.
Has this already been discussed elsewhere?
This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere
Links to previous discussion of this feature:
No response
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StanFromIreland commentedon Feb 16, 2025
serhiy-storchaka commentedon Feb 16, 2025
There are few more differences from
xgettext:xgettextonly supports one tag. If you use--add-commentsseveral times, only the last one has effect. The documentation is not clear about this. In Python, implementing either behavior is equally easy, but in C supporting multiple tags would add much complexity.xgettextlooks not for a prefix, but for a substring. So--add-comments=8n:will find strings with the "i18n:" prefix and then remove "i1". This is weird, and this contradicts the documentation.xgettextstrips initial whitespaces from the tag for some reasons. I think this is the part of the above wart. I do not see reasons for this.tomasr8 commentedon Feb 16, 2025
Yes, xgettext doesn't allow this, and it's quite confusing since it doesn't warn when you specify
--add-commentsmultiple times. I think we should support multiple tags (as babel does) since it's quite easy to do so.Definitely strange, the docs say: "place comment blocks starting with TAG and preceding keyword lines in output file". Again, I think sticking with a prefix is the best option here.
Do you mean whitespace between
#and the tag? e.g.serhiy-storchaka commentedon Feb 16, 2025
No, whitespaces at the start of the argument.
--add-comments=" i18n:"is the same as--add-comments=i18n:.serhiy-storchaka commentedon Feb 16, 2025
Well, if babel does this, it is an argument for implementing such behavior.
gh-130057: Pygettext: Support translator comments (GH-130061)