On 4/6/06, Alex Martelli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 4/6/06, Martin Blais <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > - We could also have a prefix "I" for strings to be marked but not > > runtime-translated, to replace the N_() strings. > > I'm more dubious about this one, because I don't really see the point. > Expand pls? With a couple of use cases, maybe?
N_() is used for marking up strings to be extracted for the catalogs, but that will get expanded programmatically later on, explicitly using _(variable) syntax or with a call to gettext(). For example, using my web forms library (wink, wink, open source at http://furius.ca/atocha/), I declare forms at module-level, and so this gets evaluated only once at import time, when the i18n environment is not determined yet:: form1 = Form( 'test-form', StringField('name', N_("Person's Name")), ... The point of declaring these at module or class level is that once the apache child is loaded, none of the forms ever need be rebuilt, i.e. it's fast. N_() is a no-op (i.e. lambda x: x). Later on, when a request is processed (when we've setup the i18n target environment), the label gets translated when used (i.e. from the Atocha code):: def _get_label( self, field ): """ Returns a printable label for the given field. """ return (field.label and _(field.label) # <------ translate the label here or field.name.capitalize().decode('ascii')) In summary: sometimes you need to mark-for-translate AND translate a piece of string, two separate tasks handled by the _() function, and sometimes you just need to mark-for-translate, handled by the N_() function, under the assumption that you will be a good boy and not forget to take care of it yourself later :-) This is pretty standard getttext stuff, if you used _() a lot I'm surprised you don't have a need for N_(), I always needed it when I used i18n (or maybe I misunderstood your question?). It wouldn't make sense to me to add i'' and not I'' (or equivalents). There is another example in gloriously verbose C code version from the GNU manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/gettext_19.html#SEC19 cheers, _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
