Re: Yelp string freeze breakage (was: Yelp stuff)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 05:25, Tino Meinen wrote:
> Op di 03-08-2004, om 22:14 schreef Shaun McCance:
> > On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 13:43, Christian Rose wrote:
> > > tis 2004-08-03 klockan 19.03 skrev Shaun McCance:
> > > > (CC me on replies please.  I'm not on gnome-i18n.)
> > > > 
> > > > So Yelp had four strings marked for translation in l10n.xml.in that were
> > > > just one-character entities: “ ” ‘ ’.  Most of
> > > > the translations continued using entities for these.  But it seems that
> > > > when intltool merges the translations in from the po files, it escapes
> > > > everything.  So instead of having “ we have &8220;, which is
> > > > not at all what's wanted.
> I guess there was no way of knowing what these entities meant short of
> just asking, which I didn't do...
> I tried looking up character 8220 and the others in the character picker
> but U+8220 etc. are all Chinese characters.

8220 is in decimal.  The hexadecimal is 201C, which is how one generally
references Unicode code points.  So “ is U+201C.  I really should
have used the hex entities like “ (note the leading x).

> > > > I've decided to trust that people will have non-braindead editors and
> > > > just put the UTF-8 characters in l10n.xml.in instead.  So the string
> > > > “ has been replaced by â, etc.  Please, in your translations in
> > > > the po files, do not use entities.
> > > > 
> > > > Since intltool doesn't copy comments through for XML, you won't see the
> > > > annotations I've put on everything in l10n.xml.in.  For anybody who does
> > > > not know what these four strings are, â and â are used for quotations in
> > > > English, and â and â are for quotes inside of quotes.  Translate them to
> > > > whatever your language uses for quotations.
> I tried copying and pasting these characters from your mail into my
> emacs po-editor. This went fine, until the moment I needed to save the
> file. Emacs complained it didn't know what encoding to use and tried a
> Japanese one, which screwed up the entries.
> I tried gedit next which complained about an invalid byte-sequence.
> 
> So do you know how to get the correct characters into the po-file?
> Thanks

I had no problem inserting â into a po file with gedit.  But I work in
an all UTF-8 environment.  It sounds to me like the character encoding
you use in your locale can't encode this character.  Maybe you have to
force your editor into UTF-8 mode or something.

For the list in general: Shouldn't po files always be UTF-8?  Having a
bunch of files in one directory in CVS, each with a different encoding,
sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

--
Shaun