CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythongettext
alex
alex

Reputation: 551

Parsing gettext `.po` files with python

I need to extract messages from .po files. Is there a Python module to do that? I wrote a parser, but it depends on platform (\r\n vs. \n).

Is there a better way to do this?

Upvotes: 25

Views: 14245

Answers (3)

MestreLion
MestreLion

Reputation: 13686

In most cases you don't need to parse .po files yourself. Developers give translators a .pot template file, they rename it to xx_XX.po and translate the strings. Then you as developer only have to "compile" them to .mo files using GNU's gettext tools (or its Python implementation, pygettext)

But, if you want/need to parse the po files yourself, instead of compiling them, I strongly suggest you to use polib, a well-known python library to handle po files. It is used by several large-scale projects, such as Mercurial and Ubuntu's Launchpad translation engine:

PyPi package home: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/polib/

Code repository: https://github.com/izimobil/polib

(Original repository was hosted at Bitbucket, which no longer supports Mercurial: https://bitbucket.org/izi/polib/wiki/Home)

Documentation: http://polib.readthedocs.org

The import module is a single file, with MIT license, so you can easily incorporate it in your code like this:

import polib
po = polib.pofile('path/to/catalog.po')
for entry in po:
    print entry.msgid, entry.msgstr

It can't be easier than that ;)

Upvotes: 42

yak
yak

Reputation: 9041

Babel includes a .po files parser written in Python:

http://babel.edgewall.org/

The built-in gettext module works only with binary .mo files.

Upvotes: 3

Tadeck
Tadeck

Reputation: 137350

Use builtin gettext module: http://docs.python.org/library/gettext.html

It appeared for me as the first search result in Google after providing python gettext. If you wondered if this is what you searched for, then yes, it is.

Upvotes: -4

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