xgettext: Extract Translatable Messages from R Files in a Package

Extract Translatable Messages from R Files in a Package

Description

For each file in the ‘R’ directory (including system-specific subdirectories) of a package, extract the unique arguments passed to these “message generating” calls;

for xgettext():

to stop, warning, message, packageStartupMessage, gettext and gettextf,

for xngettext():

to ngettext.

xgettext2pot() calls both xgettext() and then xngettext().

Usage

xgettext(dir, verbose = FALSE, asCall = TRUE)

xngettext(dir, verbose = FALSE)

xgettext2pot(dir, potFile, name = "R", version, bugs)

Arguments

Details

Leading and trailing white space (space, tab and linefeed (aka newline, i.e., \n)) is removed for all the calls extracted by xgettext(), see ‘Description’ above, as it is by the internal code that passes strings for translation.

We look to see if the matched functions were called with domain = NA. If so, when asCall is true, the whole call is omitted. Note that a call might contain a nested call to gettext (or warning, etc.) whose strings would be visible if asCall is false.

xgettext2pot calls xgettext and then xngettext, and writes a PO template file (to potFile) for use with the GNU Gettext tools. This ensures that the strings for simple translation are unique in the file (as GNU Gettext requires), but does not do so for ngettext calls (and the rules are not stated in the Gettext manual, but msgfmt complains if there is duplication between the sets.).

If applied to the base package, this also looks in the ‘.R’ files in ‘R_HOME/share/R’.

Value

For xgettext, a list of objects of class "xgettext" (which has a print method), one per source file that contains potentially translatable strings.

For xngettext, a list of objects of class "xngettext", which are themselves lists of length-2 character vectors.

See Also

update_pkg_po() which calls xgettext2pot().

Examples

## Not run: ## in a source-directory build of R:
xgettext(file.path(R.home(), "src", "library", "splines"))

## End(Not run)

## Create source package-like  <tmp>/R/foo.R  and get text from it:
tmpPkg <- tempdir()
tmpRDir <- file.path(tmpPkg, "R")
dir.create(tmpRDir, showWarnings = FALSE)
fnChar <- paste(sep = "\n",
  "foo <- function(x) {",
  "  if (x < -1)  stop('too small')",
  "  # messages unduplicated (not so for ngettext)",
  "  if (x < -.5) stop('too small')",
  "  if (x < 0) {",
  "    warning(",
  "      'sqrt(x) is', sqrt(as.complex(x)),",
  "      ', which may be too small'",
  "    )",
  "  }",
  "  # calls with domain=NA are skipped",
  "  if (x == 0) cat(gettext('x is 0!\n', domain=NA))",
  "  # gettext strings may be ignored due to 'outer' domain=NA",
  "  if (x > 10) stop('x is ', gettextf('%.2f', x), domain=NA)",
  "  x",
  "}")

writeLines(fnChar, con = file.path(tmpRDir, "foo.R"))

## [[1]] : suppressing (tmpfile) name to make example Rdiff-able
xgettext(tmpPkg, asCall=TRUE )[[1]] # default; shows  ' sqrt(as.complex(x)) '
xgettext(tmpPkg, asCall=FALSE)[[1]] # doesn't ; but then ' %.2f '

unlink(tmpRDir, recursive=TRUE)