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i18n and german umlauts

Eike Kock ekock at movatis.com
Mon Dec 17 05:58:29 EST 2001 
Thanks to your suggestions I've got i18n working now!
Thanks!

Eike

"Martin von Loewis" <loewis at informatik.hu-berlin.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:j4ofl07dbh.fsf at informatik.hu-berlin.de...
> "Eike Kock" <ekock at movatis.com> writes:
>
> > I just got started with Python and internationalization using the
> > gettext module, pygettext.py and msgfmt.py. Everything works fine
> > except when it comes to special characters like german umlauts. Has
> > anyone mastered this in a plattform independent way?
>
> What problem are you facing? In the original source code, you should
> only put English messages - that will ease translation, since it will
> be easier to find a translator speaking English than finding, say,
> someone who speaks German as a foreign language.
>
> In the message catalogs, use whatever encoding you like. Make sure you
> put a GNU style PO header into each translation, like
>
> msgid ""
> msgstr ""
> "Project-Id-Version: GNU grep 2.5e\n"
> "POT-Creation-Date: 2001-03-07 00:02-0500\n"
> "PO-Revision-Date: 2001-06-09 11:14+02:00\n"
> "Last-Translator: Martin von Löwis <martin at mira.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de>\n"
> "Language-Team: German <de at li.org>\n"
> "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
> "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
> "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8-bit\n"
>
> That allows to keep track of the catalog's charset, so different
> catalogs can use different charsets.
>
> At run-time, you have two options:
>
> - get the translation from the catalog as a byte string, in the
>   encoding of the catalog. This is what gettext.gettext will do.  It
>   is the best approach if you print messages to the user's terminal,
>   since that likely uses the same encoding that the translator was
>   using.
>
> - get the translation from the catalog as a Unicode string, by
>   means of translation.ugettext (where the translation object
>   is obtained through gettext.translation(domain)). This only works
>   if the encoding of the catalog was declared in the catalog.
>   This approach is best in the following cases:
>   - you output the messages to a GUI toolkit that supports
>     Unicode (like Tkinter).
>   - you output the messages to a file with a well-known encoding
>     (like HTML). In this case, you will need to convert the Unicode
>     string to the encoding of the output file.
>   - you output the messages to a terminal, and you can find out
>     what the encoding of the terminal is (eg. through
>     locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET), of Py 2.2).
>
> HTH,
> Martin
>
> P.S. Thanks for confirming that you do use pygettext.py and
> msgfmt.py. Please notice that, as an option, you could also use GNU
> gettext for these tasks - they are likely faster than the pure-Python
> versions.
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