Re: [PATCH] xgettext does not preserve the translator comment.

[Bruno Haible]

Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> Xgettext in versions 0.13 and 0.13.1 does not preserve the
> translators' comment in the following context:
> 
> /* TRANSLATORS: Please, preserve the vertical tabulation (^K character)
>    in this message */
> static char doc[] = N_("GNU MH forw\v"
> "Options marked with `*' are not yet implemented.\n"
> "Use -help to obtain the list of traditional MH options.");
> 
> However, if the msgstr is rewritten as a single string, the comment
> is processed correctly.

Thanks for the report. It's a bug, indeed, and will be corrected in version
0.14.

> Attached is a patch that fixes this.

Thanks a lot for the patch. However, it does not treat the following
situation correctly:

/* TRANSLATORS: The strings get concatenated.  */
print (gettext ("there is not enough"
" room on a single line for this entire long, " // confusing, eh?
"verbose string"));

It leads to

#. TRANSLATORS: The strings get concatenated.
#. confusing, eh?
msgid ""
"there is not enough room on a single line for this entire long, verbose "
"string"
msgstr ""

But in this case we want to drop the "confusing, eh?" comment, since the
documented behaviour of xgettext is to extract comments _before_ the strings,
not _inside_ the strings.

The xgettext Java backend (x-java.c) already handles this case correctly;
it's possible to copy the same technique to x-c.c and x-python.c.

> Previous versions of xgettext worked OK in both cases.

I'm now adding a test case to the test suite; this should guarantee that
it won't break again in the future.

Bruno