How to use xgettext iteratively to update .po files for translation

Question

I'm looking at using xgettext to aid translation of large codebase, and I have two questions:

if I have one .po file per-language, is there an easy way to update them all using a single xgettext scan of the codebase, or must I run xgettext once for each language?
if I add the target langauge to the .po file header with poedit, xgettext seems to overwrite this with default headers. How can I stop this?

Maybe I'm using the wrong tool, in which case suggestions are welcome. What I want is to be able to scan the code and update the .po files with any new strings, but leaving any header information intact.

EDIT: I know that poedit can scan code, but I was hoping to find a command line application to perform the scanning to automate the process more easily.

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 30 '09 at 16:02

12

Yes, basically you're using the tools wrong.

xgettext extracts the tags and creates the template file. (e.g. *.pot file)

The msgmerge command updates a .po file with changes from the .pot file.

We have make rules to update the .po files, like the one below:

%.en.po : %.pot
    -[ -e $@ ] && msgmerge --width=110 --update $@ $<
    [ -e $@ ] || cp $< $@

answered Mar 30 '09 at 16:02

Douglas Leeder

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That's the missing piece of the puzzle. Many thanks for that. – Paul Dixon Mar 30 '09 at 16:31
if I'm understanding well, also you can add -j to the xgettext command, to only append missing keys. Join messages with existing file. – jamesjara Jan 10 '17 at 03:32
@jamesjara I don't know whether that will remove messages that have been deleted - msgmerge will comment out messages in the po files which have been removed from the source. – Douglas Leeder Jan 10 '17 at 10:30
How does this rule work? What language is this? Where to apply it? – buhtz Apr 27 '23 at 14:40
Hi @buhtz This is a Makefile rule, to generate or update .po files after changes in the .pot file. – Douglas Leeder Apr 27 '23 at 16:06

How to use xgettext iteratively to update .po files for translation

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