Gawk/Programmer-i18n
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13.3 Internationalizing awk
Programs
gawk
provides the following variables for
internationalization:
TEXTDOMAIN
This variable indicates the application’s text domain.
For compatibility with GNU gettext
, the default
value is "messages"
.
_"your message here"
String constants marked with a leading underscore are candidates for translation at runtime. String constants without a leading underscore are not translated.
gawk
provides the following functions for
internationalization:
dcgettext(string
[,
domain
[,
category
]])
Return the translation of string
in
text domain domain
for locale category category
.
The default value for domain
is the current value of TEXTDOMAIN
.
The default value for category
is "LC_MESSAGES"
.
If you supply a value for category
, it must be a string equal to
one of the known locale categories described in
the previous section.
You must also supply a text domain. Use TEXTDOMAIN
if
you want to use the current domain.
CAUTION: The order of arguments to the
awk
versionof the
dcgettext()
function is purposely different from the order for the C version. Theawk
version’s order was chosen to be simple and to allow for reasonableawk
-style default arguments.
dcngettext(string1, string2, number
[,
domain
[,
category
]])
Return the plural form used for number
of the
translation of string1
and string2
in text domain
domain
for locale category category
. string1
is the
English singular variant of a message, and string2
is the English plural
variant of the same message.
The default value for domain
is the current value of TEXTDOMAIN
.
The default value for category
is "LC_MESSAGES"
.
The same remarks about argument order as for the dcgettext()
function apply.
bindtextdomain(directory
[,
domain
])
Change the directory in which
gettext
looks for .gmo
files, in case they
will not or cannot be placed in the standard locations
(e.g., during testing).
Return the directory in which domain
is “bound.”
The default domain
is the value of TEXTDOMAIN
.
If directory
is the null string (""
), then
bindtextdomain()
returns the current binding for the
given domain
.
To use these facilities in your awk
program, follow these steps:
- Set the variable
TEXTDOMAIN
to the text domain of your program. This is best done in aBEGIN
rule (see section TheBEGIN
andEND
Special Patterns), or it can also be done via the-v
command-line option (see section Command-Line Options):BEGIN { TEXTDOMAIN = "guide" … }
- Mark all translatable strings with a leading underscore (‘
_
’) character. It must be adjacent to the opening quote of the string. For example:print _"hello, world" x = _"you goofed" printf(_"Number of users is %d\n", nusers)
If you are creating strings dynamically, you can still translate them, using the
dcgettext()
built-in function:91if (groggy) message = dcgettext("%d customers disturbing me\n", "adminprog") else message = dcgettext("enjoying %d customers\n", "adminprog") printf(message, ncustomers)
Here, the call to
dcgettext()
supplies a different text domain ("adminprog"
) in which to find the message, but it uses the default"LC_MESSAGES"
category.The previous example only works if
ncustomers
is greater than one. This example would be better done withdcngettext()
:if (groggy) message = dcngettext("%d customer disturbing me\n", "%d customers disturbing me\n", ncustomers, "adminprog") else message = dcngettext("enjoying %d customer\n", "enjoying %d customers\n", ncustomers, "adminprog") printf(message, ncustomers)
- During development, you might want to put the
.gmo
file in a private directory for testing. This is done with thebindtextdomain()
built-in function:BEGIN { TEXTDOMAIN = "guide" # our text domain if (Testing) { # where to find our files bindtextdomain("testdir") # joe is in charge of adminprog bindtextdomain("../joe/testdir", "adminprog") } … }
See section A Simple Internationalization Example
for an example program showing the steps to create
and use translations from awk
.
Next: Translator i18n, Previous: Explaining gettext, Up: Internationalization [Contents][Index]