[Python-Dev] Re: gettext in the standard library (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Sat, 19 Aug 2000 11:28:32 +0200

Martin von Loewis wrote:

In any case, I think it is a good idea to support retrieval of translated strings as Unicode objects. I can think of two alternative interfaces: gettext.gettext(msgid, unicode=1) #or gettext.unigettext(msgid) Of course, if applications install , they'd know whether they want unicode or byte strings, so would still take a single argument.

Hmm, if your catalogs are encoded in UTF-8 and use non-ASCII chars then the traditional API would have to raise encoding errors -- probably not a good idea since the errors would be hard to deal with in large applications.

Perhaps the return value type of .gettext() should be given on the .install() call: e.g. encoding='utf-8' would have .gettext() return a string using UTF-8 while encoding='unicode' would have it return Unicode objects.

[Which makes me think: perhaps I should add a new codec which does pretty much the same as the unicode() call: convert the input data to Unicode ?!]

However, I don't think that this feature must be there at the first checkin; I'd volunteer to work on a patch after Barry has installed his code, and after I got some indication what the interface should be.

Right.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg

Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/