How can I compile a .po
file using xgettext with PHP files with a single command recursively?
My PHP files exist in a hierarchy, and the straight xgettext
command doesn't seem to dig down recursively.
How can I compile a .po
file using xgettext with PHP files with a single command recursively?
My PHP files exist in a hierarchy, and the straight xgettext
command doesn't seem to dig down recursively.
Got it:
find . -iname "*.php" | xargs xgettext
I was trying to use -exec
before, but that would only run one file at a time. This runs them on the bunch.
Yay Google!
For WINDOWS command line a simpe solution is:
@echo off
echo Generating file list..
dir html\wp-content\themes\wpt\*.php /L /B /S > %TEMP%\listfile.txt
echo Generating .POT file...
xgettext -k_e -k__ --from-code utf-8 -o html\wp-content\themes\wpt\lang\wpt.pot -L PHP --no-wrap -D html\wp-content\themes\wpt -f %TEMP%\listfile.txt
echo Done.
del %TEMP%\listfile.txt
Here's a solution for Windows. At first, install gettext and find from the GnuWin32 tools collection.
You can run the following command afterwards:
find /source/directory -iname "*.php" -exec xgettext -j -o /output/directory/messages.pot {} ;
The output file has to exist prior to running the command, so the new definitions can be merged with it.
This is the solution I found for recursive search on Mac:
xgettext -o translations/messages.pot --keyword=gettext `find . -name "*.php"`
Generates entries for all uses of method gettext in files whose extension is php, including subfolders and inserts them in translations/messages.pot .
You cannot achieve this with one single command. The xgettext option --files-from
is your friend.
find . -name '*.php' >POTFILES
xgettext --files-from=POTFILES
If you are positive that you do not have too many source files you can also use find
with xargs
:
find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext
However, if you have too many source files, xargs
will invoke xgettext
multiple times so that the maximum command-line length of your platform is not exceeded. In order to protect yourself against that case you have to use the xgettext option -j
, --join-existing
, remove the stale messages file first, and start with an empty one so that xgettext does not bail out:
rm -f messages.po
echo >messages.po
find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext --join-existing
Compare that with the simple solution given first with the list of source files in POTFILES
!
Using find
with --exec
is very inefficient because it will invoke xgettext -j
once for every source file to search for translatable strings. In the particular case of xgettext -j
it is even more inefficient because xgettext has to read the evergrowing existing output file messages.po
with every invocation (that is with every input source file).