Re: gettext feature request

[Léa Gris]

Le 13/08/2021 à 18:14, Jean-Jacques Brucker écrivait :
> Le 12/08/2021 à 16:29, Chet Ramey a écrit :
> > On 8/11/21 6:35 PM, Jean-Jacques Brucker wrote:
> > > Thank a lot Chet.
> > >
> > > I still think it would have been more consistent to extend the $'...' 
> > > syntax.
> > Why would it be more consistent to add translation to a quoting syntax 
> > that
> > didn't have it than to post-process translations in a different way?
> >
> > Chet
>
>
> I'm probably less familiar with the history of shells and bash than you 
> (and
>
> others on this mailing list), but it seems to me that:
>
> First were the chains:
>   * '...' who did not expand anything
>   * "..." which expanded the syntaxes $VAR and the unfortunate `...` [1]
>
> Then the syntax $"..." was introduced, then the syntax $'...' (bash 2.X).
>
> As the character '$' means "interprets (synonym: translates) what 
> follows", it
> seems to me quite consistent that $"..." means "translates the entire 
> following
> string"
>
> Conversely, the syntax $'...' seems to me much less consistent. 
> (Reminder: C is
> prior to shells, and bash is itself written in C).
>
> However, the "C-string" feature is very useful (and nowadays probably 
> more used
> than the translation feature).
>
> In absolute terms, if one day we would list all the historical design 
> errors,
> dare to break some compatibilities, and manage to establish new shell 
> standards
> (I'm probably dreaming ... but do we ever know ?). Then we could have:

I would have really loved if Bash expanded translations with its 
built-in printf using a `-g` flag for gettext and positional arguments 
support instead of expanding string literal translations.

It would have allowed something like :

```sh
#!/usr/bine/env bash

# -g Gettext translation of Hello World into variable my_string
printf -v my_string -g 'Hello World!'

# Printout using gettext translated format string
printf -g 'String %1$q has %2$d characters\n' "$my_string" "${#my_string}"
```

Using this German language file:

```po
#: a.sh:4
msgid "Hello World!"
msgstr "Hallo Welt!"
#: a.sh:7
msgid "String %1$q has %2$d characters\n"
msgstr "%2$d Zeichen lang ist die Zeichenkette %1$q\n"
```

In default English, the output would be:
```none
String Hello\ World\! has 12 characters
```

In German, the output would be:
```none
11 Zeichen lang ist die Zeichenkette Hallo\ Welt\!
```


--
Léa Gris