A way to translate JS with Poedit

Question

I´m translating strings in PHP with Gettext and Poedit software. I would like to use translated strings also in JavaScript, but without putting the code inline into HTML-documents, but in external files. Inline in HTML-documents it would be no problem because the inline JS-code is also rendered. An example:

var hello = <?=_("hello");?>

The translator should use the same translation-tables as the php-code does (because of duplicate strings).

So my idea was to "compile" the JavaScript files with PHP. For example in an external JS-file is this code:

if (window.confirm("_translate('are_you_sure')")) {
location.href = this.href;
}

A php script reads this code above and finds all strings inside _translate() . The code will replace _translate('are_you_sure') with the translated string. It works but is never translating, because the Poedit software will not find the string in _translate() even if I add _translate into the keys of the source. So there is no translated strings to be translated.

So my question is how to tell Poedit that he should read strings with _translate() inside a javascript-file?

Answer 1

you could include a php script, which do the translations in the javascript file

$js = $_GET['js'];

// security check
if (preg_match('~[^a-z0-9_-]~', $js)) {
    die("invalid js");
}

$content = file_get_contents('path_to_js/' . $js . '.js');
preg_match_all('~_translate\(\'([^\']+)\'\)~', $content, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
foreach ($matches as $match) {
    $content = str_replace($match[0], _($match[1]), $content);
}
echo $content;

so you have to include instead of yourscript.js the php file script.php?js=yourscript

Answer 2

So my question is how to tell Poedit that he should read strings with _translate() inside a javascript-file?

Add the _translate keyword (which is a non-default one for JS) to the keywords list and add the path to your .js file. That's it. Poedit/xgettext supports JavaScript for quite some time now.

You misdiagnosed your problem, though, and Poedit's JS support isn't it. The real problem is that you're expecting Poedit/xgettext to parse a string literal that happens to contain some code. "_translate('are_you_sure')" is not JavaScript code (that xgettext could find the _translate function in) in your example above — it's a string! And you're asking the confirm() function to display it including the "_translate" bit, it makes no sense.

You wouldn't have that problem with code like this:

msg = _translate('are_you_sure');
if (window.confirm(msg)) {
  location.href = this.href;
}

(Of course, you have to ensure client-side JS gettext deployment, including access to MO files, then, which is more work then translating strings on the PHP side.)