(gettext.info)Manipulating

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9 Manipulating PO Files
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   Sometimes it is necessary to manipulate PO files in a way that is
better performed automatically than by hand.  GNU ‘gettext’ includes a
complete set of tools for this purpose.

   When merging two packages into a single package, the resulting POT
file will be the concatenation of the two packages’ POT files.  Thus the
maintainer must concatenate the two existing package translations into a
single translation catalog, for each language.  This is best performed
using ‘msgcat’.  It is then the translators’ duty to deal with any
possible conflicts that arose during the merge.

   When a translator takes over the translation job from another
translator, but she uses a different character encoding in her locale,
she will convert the catalog to her character encoding.  This is best
done through the ‘msgconv’ program.

   When a maintainer takes a source file with tagged messages from
another package, he should also take the existing translations for this
source file (and not let the translators do the same job twice).  One
way to do this is through ‘msggrep’, another is to create a POT file for
that source file and use ‘msgmerge’.

   When a translator wants to adjust some translation catalog for a
special dialect or orthography — for example, German as written in
Switzerland versus German as written in Germany — she needs to apply
some text processing to every message in the catalog.  The tool for
doing this is ‘msgfilter’.

   Another use of ‘msgfilter’ is to produce approximately the POT file
for which a given PO file was made.  This can be done through a filter
command like ‘msgfilter sed -e d | sed -e '/^# /d'’.  Note that the
original POT file may have had different comments and different plural
message counts, that’s why it’s better to use the original POT file if
available.

   When a translator wants to check her translations, for example
according to orthography rules or using a non-interactive spell checker,
she can do so using the ‘msgexec’ program.

   When third party tools create PO or POT files, sometimes duplicates
cannot be avoided.  But the GNU ‘gettext’ tools give an error when they
encounter duplicate msgids in the same file and in the same domain.  To
merge duplicates, the ‘msguniq’ program can be used.

   ‘msgcomm’ is a more general tool for keeping or throwing away
duplicates, occurring in different files.

   ‘msgcmp’ can be used to check whether a translation catalog is
completely translated.

   ‘msgattrib’ can be used to select and extract only the fuzzy or
untranslated messages of a translation catalog.

   ‘msgen’ is useful as a first step for preparing English translation
catalogs.  It copies each message’s msgid to its msgstr.

   Finally, for those applications where all these various programs are
not sufficient, a library ‘libgettextpo’ is provided that can be used to
write other specialized programs that process PO files.

msgcat Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgcat’ Program

msgconv Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgconv’ Program

msggrep Invocation

Invoking the ‘msggrep’ Program

msgfilter Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgfilter’ Program

msguniq Invocation

Invoking the ‘msguniq’ Program

msgcomm Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgcomm’ Program

msgcmp Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgcmp’ Program

msgattrib Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgattrib’ Program

msgen Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgen’ Program

msgexec Invocation

Invoking the ‘msgexec’ Program

Colorizing

Highlighting parts of PO files

libgettextpo

Writing your own programs that process PO files