Last time, I discussed some of the issues about localizing a Python app in Windows. This time, I’m providing a simple demo app which shows how localization can be accomplished.
To avoid an overly verbose explanation, I’ve set up a GitHub repo with the code, a sample .po file, plus some scripts for easily creating .po/.mo files in the correct hierarchies. (Consider its contents as public domain.)
Basically: MinGW/Msys provide the necessary utilities for extracting strings and compiling .mo files. If you’re in a non-English environment, things may act odd if LANG is not set appropriately, but other than that the tools work fine. So, it’s just a matter of a few minor tweaks, and maybe some scripts or Makefiles to automate things.
The demo app in the above repo contains a minimum of magic: it will check if gettext-compatible environment settings are set (LANG, LC_MESSAGES, etc.), and if not, will create a LANG value based on locale.getdefaultlocale().
Anyway, test output on my system (Japanese Windows with English set via Regional Settings dialog) looks like follows:
LANG/LC_* unspecified:
$ ./simple_test.py Current locale: LANGUAGE None LC_ALL None LC_MESSAGES None LANG None Adjusted locale: LANGUAGE None LC_ALL None LC_MESSAGES None LANG en_US Hello world!
LANG=ja:
$ LANG=ja ./simple_test.py Current locale: LANGUAGE None LC_ALL None LC_MESSAGES None LANG ja こんにちは、世界！
And a final note: last time I made comments about encodings, but it seems that LANG values including encodings (“ja_JP.euc-jp”) don’t have any effect – at least in this demo and on Windows. Just the language/country portion is sufficient.