Making Your Extension Translateable

In Chyrp’s git repository, there is a humble Ruby file called gettext.rb. What this file does is scan a directory recursively and give you the resulting contents for a .pot file. With this handy script, there is no reason that you should not make your extension translateable. Generating the .pot file and keeping it up to date is the only hard part of translating software, and this little guy does it for you.

It will catch all of the following occurences anywhere in the directory you told it to start at (assuming you passed --domain=mymodule):

• <?php echo __("Foo", "mymodule"); ?>
• <?php echo _f("Foo %s bar", array($buzz), "mymodule"); ?>
• <?php echo _p("%s foo", "%s foos", array($number), "mymodule"); ?>
• ${ "Foo" | translate("mymodule") }
• ${ "Foo %s" | translate("mymodule") | format(bar) }
• ${ "%s foo" | translate_plural("%s foos", number, "mymodule") | format(number) }

As well as the “name”, “description”, “plural”, “notifications”, and “confirm” entries in your info.yaml file.

Here’s the help info for gettext.rb:

Usage: gettext.rb [directory] [OPTIONS]
Scans [directory] recursively for various forms of Gettext translations and outputs to a .po file.

        --project=[val]              The name of the project the .pot file is for.
        --maintainer=[val]           The maintainer of the .pot file. (Firstname Lastname <[email protected]>)
        --domain=[val]               Domain to scan for translations.
        --msgstr=[val]               Message string to translate all found translations to. Useful for debugging.
        --exclude=[val1,val2]        A list of directories to exclude from the scan.
        --keys=[val1,val2]           A list of YAML keys for which to generate translations.

    -h, --help                       Show this help message.