GNU gettext utilities: libgettextpo

9.13 Writing your own programs that process PO files

For the tasks for which a combination of ‘msgattrib’, ‘msgcat’ etc. is not sufficient, a set of C functions is provided in a library, to make it possible to process PO files in your own programs. When you use this library, you don’t need to write routines to parse the PO file; instead, you retrieve a pointer in memory to each of messages contained in the PO file. Functions for writing those memory structures to a file after working with them are provided too.

The functions are declared in the header file ‘<gettext-po.h>’, and are defined in a library called ‘libgettextpo’.

• Error Handling:		Error handling functions
• po_file_t API:		File management
• po_message_iterator_t API:		Message iteration
• po_message_t API:		The basic units of the file
• PO Header Entry API:		Meta information of the file
• po_filepos_t API:		References to the sources
• Format Type API:		Supported format types
• Checking API:		Enforcing constraints

The following example shows code how these functions can be used. Error handling code is omitted, as its implementation is delegated to the user provided functions.

struct po_xerror_handler handler =
  {
    .xerror = …,
    .xerror2 = …
  };
const char *filename = …;
/* Read the file into memory.  */
po_file_t file = po_file_read (filename, &handler);

{
  const char * const *domains = po_file_domains (file);
  const char * const *domainp;

  /* Iterate the domains contained in the file.  */
  for (domainp = domains; *domainp; domainp++)
    {
      po_message_t *message;
      const char *domain = *domainp;
      po_message_iterator_t iterator = po_message_iterator (file, domain);

      /* Iterate each message inside the domain.  */
      while ((message = po_next_message (iterator)) != NULL)
        {
          /* Read data from the message …  */
          const char *msgid = po_message_msgid (message);
          const char *msgstr = po_message_msgstr (message);

          …

          /* Modify its contents …  */
          if (perform_some_tests (msgid, msgstr))
            po_message_set_fuzzy (message, 1);

          …
        }
      /* Always release returned po_message_iterator_t.  */
      po_message_iterator_free (iterator);
    }

  /* Write back the result.  */
  po_file_t result = po_file_write (file, filename, &handler);
}

/* Always release the returned po_file_t.  */
po_file_free (file);