| checkPoFiles {tools} | R Documentation |
Check Translation Files for Inconsistent Format Strings
Description
These functions compare formats embedded in English messages
with translated strings to check for consistency. checkPoFile
checks one file, while checkPoFiles checks all files for specified
or all languages.
Usage
checkPoFile(f, strictPlural = FALSE)
checkPoFiles(language, dir = ".")
Arguments
f |
a character string giving a single filepath. |
strictPlural |
whether to compare formats of singular and plural forms in a strict way. |
language |
a character string giving a language code, or a
‘regexp’ (regular expression), to match languages in |
dir |
a path to a directory in which to check files. |
Details
Part of R's internationalization depends on translations of messages
in ‘.po’ files. In these files an ‘English’ message taken
from the R sources is followed by a translation into another
language. Many of these messages are format strings for C or R
sprintf and related functions. In these cases, the
translation must give a compatible format or an error will be
generated when the message is displayed.
The rules for compatibility differ between C and R in several ways. C
supports several conversions not supported by R, namely c,
u, p, n. It is allowed in C's sprintf()
function to have more arguments than are needed by the format string,
but in R the counts must match exactly. R requires types of
arguments to match, whereas C will do the display whether it makes
sense or not.
These functions compromise on the testing as follows. The additional formats allowed in C are accepted, and all differences in argument type or count are reported. As a consequence some reported differences are not errors.
If the strictPlural argument is TRUE, then argument
lists must agree exactly between singular and plural forms of messages; if
FALSE, then translations only need to match one or the other
of the two forms. When checkPoFiles calls checkPoFile,
the strictPlural argument is set to TRUE for files with
names starting ‘R-’, and to FALSE otherwise.
Items marked as ‘fuzzy’ in the ‘.po’ file are not processed (as they are ignored by the message compiler).
If a difference is found, the translated string is checked for variant
percent signs (e.g., the wide percent sign "\uFF05"). Such signs
will not be recognized as format specifiers, and are likely to be
errors.
Value
Both functions return an object of S3 class "check_po_files". A
print method is defined for this class to display a report on
the differences.
Author(s)
Duncan Murdoch
References
See the GNU gettext manual for the ‘.po’ file format:
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html.
See Also
update_pkg_po() which calls checkPoFile();
xgettext, sprintf.
Examples
## Not run:
checkPoFiles("de", "/path/to/R/src/directory")
## End(Not run)