[Python-Dev] Replacement for print in Python 3.0 (original) (raw)

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Wed Sep 7 21:07:07 CEST 2005

On Sep 7, 2005, at 7:11 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On 9/7/05, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 05:23, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

But print-ng looks like becoming the OOWTDI for a lot of applications. IMO it's just too early to give up on print-ng becoming the one obvious way to do it for a lot of i18n apps, too. +1. I have a gut feeling that we can make it easy for monolinguists to use printng without caring or even knowing about i18n, but also make it relatively painless to integrate i18n into an application or library. However I haven't had time to really explore that idea. I certainly didn't mean to rule that out. But I doubt that the only text to be i18n'd will occur in printf format strings. (In fact, I expect that few apps requiring i18n will be so primitive as to use any printf calls at all.)

In my experience, implementing i18n with existing Python (2.3 at
the time) features was not a big deal.

We used a translation company to translate all of the strings, and
they had no problem with normal Python %(format)s strings. We gave
it to them in an excel spreadsheet, and converted it to Apple
".strings" style files (which we parse directly in the Windows
version). Granted, we highlighted all of the "%(format)s" in the
spreadsheet so it was clear what should be preserved.

It worked like this:

def _(stringToBeLocalized): return anAppropriateString

and all formatted strings in the code looked like this: _('default english string %(variable)s') % someDict

from real world production code:

_(u'Installing this software requires %(requiredSpace)s of space.\n \nYou have selected to install this software on the iPod "%(podName) s" (%(totalFree)s available)') % { u'requiredSpace': self.installer.getRequiredFreeDiskSpace(), u'podName': self.podName, u'totalFree': space, }

I was also able to easily automate the process of extracting strings
to create that spreadsheet. I wrote a simple script that parsed the
Python modules and looked for function calls of "_" whose only
argument was a constant string. Worked great, and it was easy to write.

-bob

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