Multiline strings in Gettext?

rio517 · April 24, 2023, 1:27pm

As far as I can tell there isn’t support for multiline strings in gettext.

[Feature] Formatting of multiline strings in the PO and POT files

opened 04:58PM - 14 Nov 19 UTC

closed 08:32AM - 11 Dec 19 UTC

At the moment, the multiline strings that represent msgids are concatenated to a… single line with newlines inside them when they are dumped to PO and POT files. I can create a pull request that fixes this, with the option to make it a config setting (disabled by default). It would greatly improve readability of the msgids in the PO and POT files. I must say that I do not know how any PO editors treat the msgids in the way they are represented now. The expected behaviour would be: ```elixir gettext(""" A string on more lines """) ``` ``` msgid: "" "A string\n" "on more\n" "lines" ```` Instead of the current way where it is: ``` msgid: "A string\non more\nlines" ```

I haven’t found any workarounds other than having multiple msgid in my po file.

Am I missing something?

PJUllrich · January 9, 2025, 4:40pm

For anybody who’s struggling with this, here’s how to define multiline strings with gettext:

In Elixir:

gettext("""
This is a multiline
string

with a break.\n
""")

In the PO file:

msgid ""
"This is a multiline\n"
"string\n"
"\n"
"with a break\n"
""
msgstr ""
"This is the multiline\n"
"string\n"
"\n"
"translated\n"
""