Gettext_sigils - a sigil for using gettext with less boilerplate and better readability

Your Libraries & OS Mentoring Library Updates / Feedback
, , ,
1

Hi!

I’m happy to share my first Elixir library. But first some …

Background

As an Elixir company from a country with 4 official languages (:switzerland:), trust me when I say: we are using Gettext a lot in our Phoenix projects.

I really love the features of Gettext, but it always bothered me that it adds a lot of noise in the code, especially when using domains/contexts, interpolations or pluralization (besides, I still can’t remember which Gettext macro to use when using domains and/or contexts :sweat_smile:).

That’s why until now, we always added a ~t sigil to all our (phoenix) projects that simply delegates to gettext. We also had an m modifier that is using the current module name (eg. live view/component) as context.

Over the last few days, I extracted this (and more!) as a library called …

gettext_sigils

Github / hex.pm

It provides a new sigil ~t (which felt oddly familiar) for using Gettext translations with less boilerplate and better readability:

# before
gettext("Hello, %{name}", name: user.name)

# after
~t"Hello, #{user.name}"

When using GettextSigils (eg. in your MyAppWeb.html_helpers/0 for Phoenix projects), you can also provide how modifiers are mapped do domains and/or contexts:

# replace this
use Gettext, backend: MyApp.Gettext

# with this
use GettextSigils, 
  backend: MyApp.Gettext
  sigils: [ 
    modifiers: [ 
      m: [context: inspect(__MODULE__)],
      e: [domain: "errors"]
    ]
  ]

# then use it instead of gettext

~t"This is a global message"
~t"This is scoped to the current module/view/component"m
~t"This is a scoped error message"em

If this sounds interesting, there are a few other features, all described in the README.

As this is a very new project, contributions, bug reports and feedback in general are very welcome. I’m currently working on adding pluralization (which is a bit tricky when all you have is a sigil) where I would love some feedback (PR).

Thanks! Danke! Merci! Grazie! Grazia! :heart:

23 Likes