Gettext manual lacks information about xgettext --keyword

[Yann Dirson]

Hi,

In the section of the manual dedicated to xgettext, there is no
precise information about what the --keyword argument may look like
for various syntaxes, or even what the default keywords are.

At least a link to the "Other Programming Languages" section would be
useful.


My problem was to find a syntax to add to a configuration language
(wesnoth markup language, see wesnoth.org), and I wanted to take
advantage of the existing xgettext functionality, to avoid having to
modify it.

For this, a list of the syntax types would be useful - I mean C-like
_("...") vs. shell/awk-like _"..." / $"...", as well as how (for the
latter syntax) to change the key character.

Basically _"..." is what I wanted to use, and I would gladly use
-Lawk, but this one does not handle newlines inside strings.

OTOH, the bash $"..." syntax appears to work on such strings, so I'm
thinking of using this parsing code.  But I'd still rather have _"..."
than $"...".  And that's where it hurts: "-Lbash -k_" does not work,
and the documentation does not help.

Looking at the code I realize that '$' is not a keyword but is
hardcoded, and that keywords are only recognized if they look like
shell commands.  And tests show that things like `foo= _ "..."' can be
recognized, but that both spaces are required.


In short, what do you recommend to get a _"..." syntax supporting
multiline strings looking like:

foo=_"this is a
long
multiline
string"

TIA,
-- 
Yann Dirson    <address@hidden> |
Debian-related: <address@hidden> |   Support Debian GNU/Linux:
                                    |  Freedom, Power, Stability, Gratis
     http://ydirson.free.fr/        | Check <http://www.debian.org/>