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git-gui: add a part about format strings in po/README
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This should help tranlators that need to reorder words and strings.
Original explanation by Christian Stimming.

Also remove unneeded backslashes.

Signed-off-by: Michele Ballabio <barra_cuda@katamail.com>
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
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Michele Ballabio authored and Shawn O. Pearce committed Aug 3, 2008
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17 changes: 11 additions & 6 deletions po/README
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ matching msgid lines. A few tips:
"printf()"-like functions. Make sure "%s", "%d", and "%%" in your
translated messages match the original.

When you have to change the order of words, you can add "<number>\$"
When you have to change the order of words, you can add "<number>$"
between '%' and the conversion ('s', 'd', etc.) to say "<number>-th
parameter to the format string is used at this point". For example,
if the original message is like this:
Expand All @@ -111,12 +111,17 @@ matching msgid lines. A few tips:
and if for whatever reason your translation needs to say weight first
and then length, you can say something like:

"WEIGHT IS %2\$d, LENGTH IS %1\$d"
"WEIGHT IS %2$d, LENGTH IS %1$d"

The reason you need a backslash before dollar sign is because
this is a double quoted string in Tcl language, and without
it the letter introduces a variable interpolation, which you
do not want here.
A format specification with a '*' (asterisk) refers to *two* arguments
instead of one, hence the succeeding argument number is two higher
instead of one. So, a message like this

"%s ... %*i of %*i %s (%3i%%)"

is equivalent to

"%1$s ... %2$*i of %4$*i %6$s (%7$3i%%)"

- A long message can be split across multiple lines by ending the
string with a double quote, and starting another string on the next
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