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How can I compile a .po file using xgettext with PHP files with a single command recursively?

My PHP files exist in a hierarchy, and the straight xgettext command doesn't seem to dig down recursively.

karel
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neezer
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5 Answers5

21

Got it:

find . -iname "*.php" | xargs xgettext

I was trying to use -exec before, but that would only run one file at a time. This runs them on the bunch.

Yay Google!

neezer
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  • well it's not working for me, but you showed me a way for possibility otherwise would be accepted and live with it as if there is no better way that this – Deck Trout Jul 28 '13 at 07:32
  • Hi, Nice work, but becarefull to add -j at end of the command, unless it wont works – Ata Apr 18 '14 at 16:50
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    This is wrong, because if there are too many files to fit on one commandline, xargs will run xgettext multiple times, causing the earlier invocations to be clobbered. Just adding -j isn't right, either, since you need to delete the file first or you'll join with the old data. – Glenn Maynard May 01 '14 at 20:37
  • And adding -j when a file *doesn't* exist throws an error. xgettext isn't very mature... – Glenn Maynard May 01 '14 at 20:38
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    See also answer http://stackoverflow.com/a/12692493/133408 with `--files-from` option if many files are parsed –  Jul 24 '14 at 08:37
  • @GlennMaynard I am trying to extract gettexted labels from my project which has more than 3,000 .php files and yes some files are ignored. How can I get ALL the gettexted labels? Thanks in advance – ivantxo Feb 14 '15 at 01:44
  • @ivantxo Please post your question as a question. Thanks. – Glenn Maynard Feb 17 '15 at 15:47
8

For WINDOWS command line a simpe solution is:

 @echo off
echo Generating file list..
dir html\wp-content\themes\wpt\*.php /L /B /S > %TEMP%\listfile.txt
echo Generating .POT file...
xgettext -k_e -k__ --from-code utf-8  -o html\wp-content\themes\wpt\lang\wpt.pot -L PHP --no-wrap -D html\wp-content\themes\wpt -f %TEMP%\listfile.txt
echo Done.
del %TEMP%\listfile.txt
Antonio
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5

You cannot achieve this with one single command. The xgettext option --files-from is your friend.

find . -name '*.php' >POTFILES
xgettext --files-from=POTFILES

If you are positive that you do not have too many source files you can also use find with xargs:

find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext

However, if you have too many source files, xargs will invoke xgettext multiple times so that the maximum command-line length of your platform is not exceeded. In order to protect yourself against that case you have to use the xgettext option -j, --join-existing, remove the stale messages file first, and start with an empty one so that xgettext does not bail out:

rm -f messages.po
echo >messages.po
find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext --join-existing

Compare that with the simple solution given first with the list of source files in POTFILES!

Using find with --exec is very inefficient because it will invoke xgettext -j once for every source file to search for translatable strings. In the particular case of xgettext -j it is even more inefficient because xgettext has to read the evergrowing existing output file messages.po with every invocation (that is with every input source file).

Guido Flohr
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0

Here's a solution for Windows. At first, install gettext and find from the GnuWin32 tools collection.

You can run the following command afterwards:

find /source/directory -iname "*.php" -exec xgettext -j -o /output/directory/messages.pot {} ;

The output file has to exist prior to running the command, so the new definitions can be merged with it.

Unambiguous
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  • Perhaps installing and using Cygwin? I know it's not a native solution, but should get you the same result. – neezer Dec 10 '09 at 18:03
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This is the solution I found for recursive search on Mac: 

xgettext -o translations/messages.pot --keyword=gettext `find . -name "*.php"`

Generates entries for all uses of method gettext in files whose extension is php, including subfolders and inserts them in translations/messages.pot .

lanzalibre
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