Re: Bug#196637: gettext: xgettext messes with control characters (fwd)

[Göran Weinholt]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 12:06:04PM +0200, Stepan Kasal wrote:
> Hello,
>       thank you for taking care to report bugs.
> 
> On Sun, Jun 08, 2003 at 06:35:22PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > xgettext has been changing \v to ^K for some time now. Please make it
> > stop.
> 
> well, I think this is one big misunderstanding.  \v _is_ in fact ^K.

Yes, I know this. But I'd rather not have "unescaped" control characters
in the .po files, as it makes for more difficult editing.

> Both \v and ctrl-K mean the character with code 11, ie. 0x0b, which is
> also called ``vertical-tab.''

> When you look at the complaint as it arived to the list, you see that
> the vertical tab has been there ans has been interpreted the right way:
> 
> > $ echo 'gettext("This ->\v<- is a \\v.\n")'|xgettext -L c -o - -|tail -3
> > #: standard input:1
> > msgid "This ->
> >               <- is a \\v.\n"
> > msgstr ""

This was pasted from a terminal, where the ^K was interpreted as a
vertical tab, as you can see. There are no real vertical tabs in my
messages. Let's compare how xgettext handles \v to how it handles \t:

$ echo 'gettext("This ->\t<- is a \\t.\n")'|xgettext -L c -o - -|tail -3
#: standard input:1
msgid "This ->\t<- is a \\t.\n"
msgstr ""

This is much better, and I think it should do the same for \v. Now I've
noticed that xgettext turns \a in the output into real ^G's as well.
Imagine hearing a beep every time you cat your po file. :)

> So I guess the most probable resolution is that this is not a bug and
> whenever the editor (vim?, emacs?) displays ^K, it means \v.

Actually, my editor displays control characters as black dots. It would
be worse for people who don't have a binary clean editor, I presume.

> Sure you can configure your editor, if it were that important.
> 
> Hope this explains it,
>       Stepan Kasal

I hope this explains what I mean a little better,

-- 
Göran Weinholt <address@hidden>
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