Re: zh_TW.Big5.po: illegal control sequence

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 04:13:48PM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:

> You have recently committed changes to several files, including
> po/zh_TW.Big5.po to the Midnight Commander CVS repository.
> 
> I cannot process zh_TW.Big5.po - msgfmt from gettext 0.10.35 reports:
> 
> zh_TW.Big5.po:687: illegal control sequence

Yes; the Big5 encoding is a problem as it uses the '\' char.

The way big5 encoding is handled in old and new gettext is mutually
incompatible.

>>From what I can see you have consistently replaced double backslashes with
> the single ones in the Chinese text (but not in the language-neutral
> constructs like `\\1').
> 
> Your changes don't work with gettext 0.10.35. What version of gettext are
> you using? Have you tested your changes? Please explain us what kind of
> "syntax errors and multibyte errors" you have been trying to fix.

You can upgrade to gettext 0.10.37; the advantage is that version of gettext
uses the charset= value, and correclty breaks the lines at the correct
boundary (instead of breaking it in the middle of a CJK char as before).
Another advantage is that the text inside the po files is now real big5
text, that is, it can be edited with any standard editor.

If you need to support both old and new gettext, then the only solutions
are to check the po files and replace all the words using a '\' in them;
or convert the file to utf-8. 

note that there were also (maybe not in that given package) other real
multibyte problems aside the '\' problem; the fact that the new gettext
can detect them is, by itself, a good enough reason to switch, imho.

> -- 
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975