[Python-Dev] Changes to gettext.py for Python 2.3 (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry@python.org
11 Apr 2003 13:51:56 -0400

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Hi I18n-ers,

I plan on checking in the following changes to the gettext.py module for Python 2.3, based on feedback from the Zope and Mailman i18n work. Here's a summary of the changes, hopefully there aren't too many controversies . I'll update the tests and the docs at the same time.

• Expose NullTranslations and GNUTranslations to all

• Set the default charset to iso-8859-1. It used to be None, which would cause problems with .ugettext() if the file had no charset parameter. Arguably, the po/mo file would be broken, but I still think iso-8859-1 is a reasonable default.

• Add a "coerce" default argument to GNUTranslations's constructor. The reason for this is that in Zope, we want all msgids and msgstrs to be Unicode. For the latter, we could use .ugettext() but there isn't currently a mechanism for Unicode-ifying msgids.

The plan then is that the charset parameter specifies the encoding for both the msgids and msgstrs, and both are decoded to Unicode when read. For example, we might encode po files with utf-8. I think the GNU gettext tools don't care.

Since this could potentially break code [*] that wants to use the encoded interface .gettext(), the constructor flag is added, defaulting to False. Most code I suspect will want to set this to True and use .ugettext().

• A few other minor changes from the Zope project, including asserting that a zero-length msgid must have a Project-ID-Version header for it to be counted as the metadata record.

-Barry

[*] I've come to the opinion that using anything other than Unicode msgids and msgstrs just won't work well for Python, and thus you really should be using the .ugettext() method everywhere. It's also insane to mix .gettext() and .ugettext(). In Zope, all human readable messages will be Unicode strings internally, so we definitely want Unicode msgids.

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