In a perl Module I want to use https://metacpan.org/pod/Locale::Maketext::Simple to convert strings to different languages.
My .po files are located unter /opt/x/languages, e.g. /opt/x/languages/en.po.
In my module I'm using the following header:
use Locale::Maketext::Simple (
Path => '/opt/x/languages',
Style => 'maketext'
);
loc_lang('en');
An entry in the .po files looks like this:
msgid "string [_1] to be converted"
msgstr "string [_1] is converted"
and the check via console with msgfmt -c en.po throws no errors so far.
But when I'm converting a string with loc() like loc("string [_1] to be converted", "xy") it gives me the output of "string xy to be converted" instead of "string xy is converted" as I would expect it. This looks to me like the .po files are not loaded correctly.
How can I check what .po files are found during maketext instantiation? Or am I mixing things up and there' a general mistake?
Edit 1: Thanks for the comments, but it still does not work.
I've checked the files with https://poedit.net/ and created the corresponding .mo files (currently for de and en) with this tool as well. They are located next to the .po files (inside /opt/x/languages).
For completeness, my header looks like this:
# MY OWN LANGUAGE FILE (DE)
# 06-2019 by me
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: 1.0.0\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2019-06-01 00:00+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2019-06-02 00:00+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: thatsme <[email protected]>\n"
"Language-Team: unknown\n"
"Language: de\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"X-Generator: Poedit 2.2.3\n"
msgid "string [_1] to be converted"
msgstr "string [_1] is converted"
After some more digging and testing I finally found the issue for this behaviour, so here's my solution so far. Hope this may help others, because you rarely find any good documentation on this topic:
Add libraries
I added the library https://metacpan.org/pod/Locale::Maketext::Simple as stated above, but forgot to add https://metacpan.org/pod/Locale::Maketext::Lexicon.
This took me quite long to see, because there were no exceptions or errors thrown, just... nothing.
In the Maketext::Simple documentation it says
If Locale::Maketext::Lexicon is not present, it implements a minimal localization function by simply interpolating [_1] with the first argument, [_2] with the second, etc.
what looks at a first glance that .po files are loaded without Maketext::Lexikon, but it simply replaces placeholders.
Other issues:
I then discovered that all string are translated, except for the ones with placeholders like [_1]. I could not find a reason for this, but I moved to
Style => 'gettext'
and replaced all [_1], [_2]... with %1, %2... - that works like a charm.