Re: Emacs i18n

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 3/6/19 12:19 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>
> That's the easy case. This one is a bit tougher: (message "The program
> says: " (shell-command-to-string "foo"))
>
Assuming you meant this:

  (message (concat "The program says: " (shell-command-to-string "foo")))

then it shouldn't be tough at all. The Elisp code should be rewritten
like this:

   (message "The program says: %s" (shell-command-to-string "foo"))

xgettext will automatically put "The program says: %s" into the pool of
translatable strings. The output of the "foo" command won't be
translated, nor should it be.

Anyway, the Elisp code with "concat" needs to be rewritten regardless of
whether we do i18n, as it can throw an exception if the shell command's
output contains "%".

All this is routine for program internationalization. Emacs is not
special here; we've often had to do this sort of thing for other GNU
packages.