Re: gettext() translations, encoding and Glib::locale_to_utf8()

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:59:02 +0200
Toralf Lund <toralf procaptura com> wrote:

> As I was testing the French translations of GUI texts in one of our 
> applications the other day, it occurred to me that the software has
> some encoding issues. Essentially, I was doing
> 
>     LANG=FR_fr myApplication
> 
> (on the command line), and got a lot of messages of the form
> 
>     (myApplication:28074): Pango-WARNING **: Invalid UTF-8 string
> passed to pango_layout_set_text()
> 
> The reason for this was that the program has a lot of calls like:
> 
>     Gtk::Label label;
>     ...
>     label.set_text(_("Data"));
> 
> - as well as some similar stuff for text columns in a TreeView. The 
> "_(String)" macro is defined "the usual way", i.e. as
> gettext(String). With the above LANG setting, this apparently means
> passing an ISO-8859-1 string to set_text() - this is the standard
> encoding for the "FR_fr" setting, and therefore also the encoding
> gettext() uses for the strings it returns (or so it seems.)
> Gtk::Label::set_text(), on the other hand, expects UTF-8. If there
> are accented letters in the translation text, this implies passing
> characters that are considered invalid.
> 
> If, on the other hand, I enter
> 
>     LANG=FR_fr.utf8 myApplication
> 
> everything is OK, because then the locale encoding is UTF-8, so this
> is what _() and gettext() (also) return.
> 
> I suppose you knew that already. Now the question(s):
> 
> What do you reckon is the best way to deal with this situation?
> Should I for instance wrap all _() calls in Glib::locale_to_utf8().
> Or would it be better to define _(String) as
> Glib::locale_to_utf8(gettext(String))? Or is there another way I can
> call gettext(), so as to get it to return UTF-8 encoded strings? Or
> can I safely ignore the whole issue, based on the assumption that the
> encoding will be set to utf8 in a more "real" setup? What do other
> people do?

You should specify the codeset that gettext() will supply
programmatically - see bind_textdomain_codeset().

Chris