Checking tool for gettext pot, po and mo files
i18nspector [--language <lang>] [--debian] <file> [<file> …]
-l<lang>,--language<lang>
Assume this language. <lang> should be a 2- or 3-letter ISO 639 language code, possibly followed by underscore and a 2-letter ISO 3166 territory code.
--debian
Allow checking Debian (binary or source) packages. This option is enabled by default on modern Debian systems and its derivatives; it needs to be explicitly enabled on other systems.
i18nspector is a tool for checking translation templates (POT), message catalogues (PO) and compiled message catalogues (MO) files for common problems. These files are used by the GNU gettext translation functions and tools in many different development environments.
The following format is used for all the reported problems:
code: file: tag [extra]
where:
code is a letter indicating type of the message: E (error), W (warning), I (informative message), or P (pedantic message);
tag is a name of the problem that was discovered;
extra can contain additional information about the problem.
The date refers to the time before the first GNU gettext release. As such, it's extremely unlikely to be correct.
References: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gettext.git/tree/ChangeLog.0#n1767
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
Computing a plural form value triggers division by zero or integer overflow. This normally indicates an error in the plural form expression.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
Computing a plural form value triggers division by zero or integer overflow. (But there are no translated messages which use plural forms.) This normally indicates an error in the plural form expression.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
The Content-Type header field contains xgettext boilerplate. It should be in the form text/plain; charset=encoding.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html#index-encoding-of-PO-files
Severity, certainty: important, certain
The date header field contains xgettext boilerplate. The date format should be YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm+ZZzz, e.g. 2011-11-05 10:14+0100.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
The Language-Team header field contains xgettext boilerplate. It should contain English name of the language, and the email address or homepage URL of the language team.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
The Last-Translator header field contains xgettext boilerplate. It should contain the last translator's name and email address.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
The Project-Id-Version header field contains xgettext boilerplate. It should contain the name and the version of the package.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
The Report-Msgid-Bugs-To header field contains xgettext boilerplate. It should contain an email address or URL where one can report bugs in the untranslated strings.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
Header fields and messages contained by this file couldn't be decoded to Unicode. The usual cause of this is incorrect or missing encoding declaration.
Note that in the absence of encoding declaration, i18nspector assumes ASCII encoding.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html#index-encoding-of-PO-files
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#section-5
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
There's a type mismatch between a C format argument in msgid and the corresponding format argument in msgid_plural; or between a C format argument in msgstr and msgid; or between a C format argument in msgstr[N] and msgid or msgid_plural.
References: printf(3)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
A C format string could not be parsed.
References: printf(3)
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
A C format string for msgid consumes more arguments than msgid_plural; or msgstr consumes more arguments than msgid; or msgstr[N] consumes more arguments than msgid or msgid_plural.
References: printf(3)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
A C format string for msgid consumes less arguments than msgid_plural; or msgstr consumes less arguments than msgid; or msgstr[N] consumes less arguments than msgid or msgid_plural.
Note that in some languages, the commonly used Plural-Forms expression evaluates to the same value for n=1 and n=21, n=31, and so on. Take this Serbian translation for example:
Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2; ... msgid "one byte" msgid_plural "%d bytes" msgstr[0] "%d bajt" msgstr[1] "%d bajta" msgstr[2] "%d bajtova"
Here %d should not be replaced with the spelled-out form jedan. Either %d should be kept, or the Plural-Forms expression should be amended, so that there is a special case for n=1:
Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; plural=n==1 ? 3 : n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2 ... msgid "one byte" msgid_plural "%d bytes" msgstr[0] "%d bajt" msgstr[1] "%d bajta" msgstr[2] "%d bajtova" msgstr[3] "jedan bajt"
References: printf(3)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
A C format string uses a conversion specified or length modifier, for which a more portable replacement exists:
For integer conversions (%d, %i, %o, %u, %x, and %X), use the ll length modifier instead of L or q.
For floating-point conversions (%a, %A, %e, %E, %f, %F, %g, and %G), don't use the l length modifier.
Use the z length modifier instead of Z.
Use %lc instead of %C.
Use %ls instead of %S.
References: printf(3)
Severity, certainty: pedantic, possible
A C format string includes a redundant character flag. Either it's a duplicate, or it has no effect:
The + flag overrides the space flag.
The - flag overrides the 0 flag.
If a precision is given, the 0 flag has no effect on integer conversions (%d, %i, %o, %u, %x, and %X).
References: printf(3)
Severity, certainty: pedantic, possible
Either a plural form value is outside the declared range, or some values within the declared range can never be reached. This normally indicates an error in the plural form expression.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
Either a plural form value is outside the declared range, or some values within the declared range can never be reached. (But there are no translated messages which use plural forms.) This normally indicates an error in the plural form expression.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
The header contains a conflict marker (#-#-#-#-# … #-#-#-#-#). The conflict will have to be resolved manually.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Creating-Compendia.html#Creating-Compendia
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
One of the translated messages appear to contain a conflict marker (#-#-#-#-# … #-#-#-#-#). The conflict will have to be resolved manually.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Creating-Compendia.html#Creating-Compendia
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
Two flags with conflicting meanings are associated with one of the messages.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
Severity, certainty: important, possible
The date refers to the future. As such, it's extremely unlikely to be correct.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
The header entry in this file is preceded by other entries. The header entry should be always the first one.
Severity, certainty: important, certain
Multiple identical flags are associated with the header entry.
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
This file contains multiple header entries.
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
This file contains multiple header fields of the same name.
Severity, certainty: minor, wild-guess
This file contains multiple Content-Transfer-Encoding header fields.
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
This file contains multiple Content-Type header fields.
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
This file contains multiple date header fields of the same name.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
This file contains multiple Language header fields.
Severity, certainty: important, certain
This file contains multiple Language-Team header fields.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
This file contains multiple Last-Translator header fields.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
This file contains multiple MIME-Version header fields.
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
This file contains multiple Plural-Forms header fields.
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
This file contains multiple Project-Id-Version header fields.
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
This file contains multiple Report-Msgid-Bugs-To header fields.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
This file contains multiple X-Poedit-* header fields.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
This file contains multiple definitions of the same message.
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
Multiple identical flags are associated with one of the messages.
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
This file doesn't contain any messages.
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
The message with empty msgid contains plural forms. Such messages are reserved by GNU gettext for header entries, and your code should not call ngettext("", …).
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
The message with empty msgid contains plural forms. Such messages are reserved by GNU gettext for header entries, and your code should not call gettext("").
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
The language header field contains encoding declaration. Such information shouldn't be included in this field.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
The header entry is marked as fuzzy. To increase operability with very old (<< 0.11) msgfmt(1) versions, which didn't support fuzzy header entries, it shouldn't be marked as such.
References: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gettext.git/tree/NEWS?id=v0.11#n44
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
Some strings in an entry start with a newline, but some don't. Either all of them should start with a newline, or none of them should.
Severity, certainty: important, possible
Number of plural forms in a message definition doesn't match number of plural forms declared in another message definition.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Translating-plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
Some strings in an entry end with a newline, but some don't. Either all of them should end with a newline, or none of them should.
Severity, certainty: important, possible
Number of plural forms in a message definition doesn't match number of plural forms declared in the header.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Translating-plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
The Plural-Forms declaration is incorrect, according to i18nspector's linguistic data.
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
The Plural-Forms declaration is incorrect, according to i18nspector's linguistic data. (But there are no translated messages which use plural forms.)
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
Value of the Content-Transfer-Encoding header field is invalid. It should be 8bit.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#section-6.1
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
Value of the Content-Type header field should is invalid. It should be in the form text/plain; charset=encoding.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html#index-encoding-of-PO-files
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#section-5
Severity, certainty: important, possible
The date is invalid or in an invalid format. The format should be YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm+ZZzz, e.g. 2011-11-05 10:14+0100.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
The Language header field couldn't be parsed, or it contains an unknown language.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: important, possible
The Language-Team header field contains an e-mail address that uses a reserved domain name.
References: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
The Last-Translator header field could neither be parsed as an e-mail, or the e-mail address uses a reserved domain name.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
Value of the MIME-Version header field is invalid. It should be 1.0.
References: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#section-4
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
This file couldn't be parsed a MO file.
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
A range: flag couldn't be parsed, or the designated range contained less than two numbers. The syntax is range: min..max, where both values are non-negative integers.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
Severity, certainty: important, certain
The Report-Msgid-Bugs-To header field could neither be parsed as an e-mail nor as a URL, or the e-mail address uses a reserved domain name.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
Language of this file has been declared in multiple places, but the declarations don't match.
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
Language-Team and Last-Translator header fields contain the same e-mail address.
Severity, certainty: minor, possible
The Language header field contains a variant designator that is not relevant for the message translation.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: minor, possible
The original string or the translated string contains an XML fragment, which is not well-formed.
References: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-well-formed
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
The Content-Transfer-Encoding header field doesn't exist. It should be set to 8bit.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#section-6.1
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
The Content-Type header field doesn't exist. It should be set to text/plain; charset=encoding.
Note that in the absence of encoding declaration, i18nspector assumes ASCII encoding.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html#index-encoding-of-PO-files
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#section-5
Severity, certainty: important, certain
The date header field doesn't exist.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
The Language header field doesn't exist.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
The Language-Team header field does not exist. It should contain English name of the language, and the email address or homepage URL of the language team.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
The Last-Translator header field doesn't exist. It should contain the last translator's name and email address.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
The MIME-Version header field does't exist. It should be to set to 1.0.
References: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045#section-4
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
The Project-Id-Version header field doesn't appear to contain any name. It should contain both the name and the version of the package.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: minor, possible
The Plural-Forms header field does not exist, even though some of the messages use plural forms (although none of them have been translated).
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
The Project-Id-Version header field does not exist. It should contain the name and the version of the package.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
The Report-Msgid-Bugs-To header field does not exist or it is empty. It should contain an email address or URL where one can report bugs in the untranslated strings.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
The Plural-Forms header field does not exist, even though some of the translated messages use plural forms.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
The Project-Id-Version header field doesn't appear to contain any version. It should contain both the name and the version of the package.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html
Severity, certainty: pedantic, possible
This file uses an encoding that is not compatible with ASCII.
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
This file uses an encoding that is not widely supported by software.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Header-Entry.html#index-encoding-list
Severity, certainty: important, certain
An input/output error or another operating system error occurred while checking this file.
Severity, certainty: serious, certain
Translation is missing for some plural forms of a message.
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
A c-format flag is associated with the message, but qt-plural-format should be used instead.
The only C format directive that the message uses is %n. It is very atypical to use it alone in a C format string.
References: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/i18n-source-translation.html#handling-plurals
Severity, certainty: important, possible
A range: flag is associated with a message that doesn't have plural string. range: flags only make sense for translations involving plural forms.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
Severity, certainty: normal, certain
A flag associated with one of the messages is redundant, because it's implied by another flag.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
Severity, certainty: pedantic, certain
The header contains a line that does not belong to any header field. Note that RFC-822-style folding of long headers is not supported.
References: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2012-12/msg00010.html
Severity, certainty: important, certain
The message entry contains annotations about previous untranslated string (#| msgid ...), even though the message is not marked as fuzzy. These annotations are only useful for fuzzy messages, and should be removed when unfuzzying.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
Value of the Plural-Forms header field could not be parsed. It should be in the form nplurals=n; plural=expression.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
This file couldn't be parsed a PO file. In some rare cases this is due to incorrect or missing encoding declaration.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
https://bugs.debian.org/692283
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
Value of the Plural-Forms header field could not be parsed. (But there are no translated messages which use plural forms.) It should be in the form nplurals=n; plural=expression.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
Severity, certainty: important, possible
The PO template file contains a translated message.
Severity, certainty: minor, certain
i18nspector was unable to determine language of this file. Absence of this information will prevent it from performing further checks.
Severity, certainty: normal, wild-guess
An unexpected flag is associated with the header entry. The only flag that makes sense for the header entry is fuzzy.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
Severity, certainty: normal, possible
This file declares an encoding that couldn't be recognized by i18nspector. It might be a typo. Absence of encoding information will prevent i18nspector from performing further checks.
Severity, certainty: important, possible
File format of this file couldn't be recognized. It might be a bug in i18nspector.
Severity, certainty: normal, wild-guess
The header field name is unknown to i18nspector. It might be a typo or a capitalization error (header field names are case-sensitive).
References: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2012-12/msg00010.html
Severity, certainty: minor, wild-guess
An unknown flag is associated with one of the messages. It might be a typo.
References: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html
Severity, certainty: normal, wild-guess
Language declared in X-Poedit-Language couldn't be recognized. It might be a bug in i18nspector.
Severity, certainty: minor, wild-guess
The declared encoding cannot represent all characters commonly used in this language. This is a strong indication that the declared encoding is incorrect.
Severity, certainty: serious, possible
The header entry contains an unusual character. This is usually an indication of an encoding problem, such as:
using ISO 2022 escape sequences, or
using UTF-8 despite declaring an 8-bit encoding.
References: http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#bom6
Severity, certainty: important, certain
One of the translated messages contains an unusual character. This is usually an indication of an encoding problem, such as:
using ISO 2022 escape sequences, or
using UTF-8 despite declaring an 8-bit encoding.
References: http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#bom6
Severity, certainty: important, possible
msgfmt(1), particularly the -c option