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

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Sat, 19 Aug 2000 11:44:19 +0200

James Henstridge wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Barry A. Warsaw wrote: > I started with Martin's libintlmodule, renamed it gettext and cleaned > up the C code a bit. This provides gettext(), dgettext(), > dcgettext(), textdomain(), and bindtextdomain() functions. The > gettext.py module imports these, and if it succeeds, it's done. > > If that fails, then there's a bunch of code, mostly derived from > Peter's fintl.py module, that reads the binary .mo files and does the > look ups itself. Note that Peter's module only supported the GNU > gettext binary format, and that's all mine does too. It should be > easy to support other binary formats (Solaris?) by overriding one > method in one class, and contributions are welcome. I think support for Solaris big endian format .po files would probably be a good idea. It is not very difficult and doesn't really add to the complexity. > > James's stuff looked cool too, what I grokked of it :) but I think > those should be exported as higher level features. I didn't include > the ability to write .mo files or the exported Catalog objects. I > haven't used the I18N services enough to know whether these are > useful. As I said above, most of that turned out not to be very useful. Did you include any of the language selection code in the last version of my gettext module? It gave behaviour very close to C gettext in this respect. It expands the locale name given by the user using the locale.alias files found on the systems, then decomposes that into the simpler forms. For instance, if LANG=enGB, then my gettext module would search for catalogs by names: ['enGB.ISO8859-1', 'enGB', 'en.ISO8859-1', 'en', 'C'] This also allows things like expanding LANG=catalan to: ['caES.ISO-8859-1', 'caES', 'ca.ISO-8859-1', 'ca', 'C'] (provided the appropriate locale.alias files are found) If you missed that that version I sent you I can send it again. It stripped out a lot of the experimental code giving a much simpler module.

Uhm, can't you make some use of the new APIs in locale.py for this ?

locale.py has a whole new set of encoding aware support for LANG variables. It supports Unix and Windows (thanks to /F).

Marc-Andre Lemburg

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