Right now, I’m extracting messages using
pybabel extract -F babel.cfg -o messages.pot .
This walks through all my Python files and extracts messages correctly. However, I call this through subprocess.call(), which is pretty ugly, given PyBbel is also written in Python.
I took a look into PyBabel, and it uses setuptools comands to do its work. I could copy the extract_messages.run() method to my Python script, but it doesn’t feel too elegant. Is there a better way to do it? There are tons of articles on how to create new setuptools commands, but no one writes about invoking them…
Maybe this is what you are looking for: How do i run the python 'sdist' command from within a python automated script without using subprocess?
I'm going to show a few alternatives to run the Babel Python code, without creating a new subprocess, from higher to lower level.
This is kind of a hack, taken from the answers linked above:
from setuptools.dist import Distribution
from babel.messages.frontend import extract_messages
dist = Distribution({'name': 'my-project', 'version': '1.0.0'}) # etc.
dist.script_name = 'setup.py'
cmd = extract_messages(dist)
cmd.ensure_finalized()
cmd.run() # TODO: error handling
pylabel script actually does something like this:
from babel.messages.frontend import main
sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw?|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])
sys.exit(main())
But you can avoid sending the commands over the sys.argv and actually call the CommandInterface python code from babel.
This is my favorite way to call it:
from babel.messages.frontend import CommandLineInterface
CommandLineInterface().run(['pybabel','extract','-F','babel.cfg','-k','lazy_gettext','-o','messages.pot','sample_project'])
CommandLineInterface().run(['pybabel','init','-i','messages.pot','-d','translations','-l','en'])
CommandLineInterface().run(['pybabel','compile','-d','translations'])
CommandLineInterface().run(['pybabel','update','-d','translations'])
That's the closest you can get to the low level code, unless you want to start copy/pasting and customizing the python code. Again, this is a 100% python solution, and it doesn't call a new process.
Good luck