POEDIT(1)

📦 version 0.19, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ POEDIT(1) ✨

okay bestie, so this is a page from the General Commands Manual, and it's about poedit, a lil shell script that helps you edit gettext po files 💖

🎀 NAME 🎀

poedit — a whole program whose entire job is helping you edit gettext po files, no cap

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

poedit [-a] [-p] [-n] <file.po>
potooledit [-a] [-p] [-n] <file.po>

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so poedit is a shell script, and it's out here doing the absolute most by teaming up with potool(1), iconv(1), and your favourite editor to help you edit gettext po files. it's giving collab of the century, honestly 🫶

here's the whole routine, step by step:

  1. it first grabs only the untranslated entries from the file — or, if you passed -a, it reorders the entries so the translated ones get grouped separately from the untranslated ones 💅
  2. it drops all that into a temporary file
  3. then it recodes the file to the charmap of your current locale 🌈
  4. then it runs your favourite editor on the temporary file so you can add your new translations ✨
  5. once you're done, it recodes the file back to the original charset
  6. and finally merges your new translations back into the original file 👑

and just so you know — poedit is also known as potooledit on Debian systems, because there's an unrelated program out here with the exact same name and we're avoiding the name clash. two icons, one name, it's messy 😭

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -a — makes poedit include the already-translated entries in the temporary file too, so you can edit them (they get grouped separately tho, don't worry). Without this option, only the untranslated entries (plus the file header) get served up for editing.
  • -p — makes poedit keep the formatting of the file intact, untouched, pristine. Without this option, all strings get re-wrapped at newlines or word boundaries so they fit in 80 columns.
  • -n — makes poedit skip all charset recoding, both before and after editing the file. no recoding, none, zero.
⚠️ bestie, listen. you should only use -n if you genuinely know what you're doing. like, truly. be particularly careful when you use this option (without -a) on files that are in an encoding that's incompatible with your locale's charmap. in that case, the intermediate file you're about to edit will probably only contain ASCII characters, which means your editor is free to interpret it as your default locale encoding. and that, in turn, will make the file invalid when it gets merged back together with the already translated messages 😭 see Debian bug #297074 for an example of exactly this happening. it happened. it's documented. we're not okay.

💀 CAVEATS 💀

by default, the program re-wraps lines in all strings in the edited file. yeah, all of them. see the -p option above if that's not the vibe you're going for 👀

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

potool(1), postats(1), locale charmap(1), msgmerge(1), msgfmt(1)

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Poedit was written by Zbigniew Chyla, and is now being maintained by Marcin Owsiany</hotpiny> <porridge@debian.org> 💖

and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this version was served up on September 15, 2012, straight from the POEDIT(1) manual, General Commands Manual edition — periodt ✨🦋💜

📦 where this page comes from