I'm trying to find a way to do this.
My game is multilingual.
I have English.txt, French.txt, etc..
I'm wondering what would be a good way to store it in the file for example:
<sendbutton.tooltip>
Use this button to send text.
The text can be as long as you like!
</sendbutton.tooltip>
or
sendbutton.tooltip = Use this button to send text.\n\nThe text can be as long as you like!
I then will map these strings to their element name for runtime use.
Other than using a standard like XML, what is usually done to do this?
Thanks
Usually this kind of localization tasks is done with GNU gettext.
It depends when are you going to load the file.
For standard translation stuff, I recommend you take a look at gettext. It provides translation tools and easy way to include it. You can store English text a C strings enclosed with translation macro () or T() or whatever, and gettext would provide you with strings that need translating. It also tracks the translations that need to be updated when original English text changes. You store all translations for specific language in separate files.
Not sure for C++ but maybe resource files where you create a separate file for each language and have key/value pairs for the lookup with each langauge using the same key but message text is in the correct language e.g.
resources.de
LOGOUT, Abmelden
resources.en
LOGOUT, Logout
then depending on users language choice, you load the appropriate resource file to display the correct text. Think you would just store the mutlilines with /n as in your second example.
Related
I am working on a multilingual project with wxWidgets, coding in c++. For now, the texts I was translating were all in the cpp files using gnu gettext. Now, I want to use xml files for specific configuration parameters. Among those are different strings to be displayed in multilingual.
Current solution
I design the xml as follows. I declare the strings to be displayed, and I also declare the respective translated strings in the xml. I can then upload them in my program while reading the xml and look in the resulting container for a string depending on the language. But I think this solution is not as elegant as with using gettext.
Do you have better ideas? Am I able to somehow use gettext with xml files on specific nodes?
I thank you in advance for your help.
I am working on a compiler for cool as compiler course assignment but I'd like to code in cool language in notepad++ so I need to define this language for notepad++, I already wrote a lexer definition in flex format and I'm going to develop a parser for cool. Is there anyway to use these material to define the language for notepad++?
I would think so. (I don't use Notepad++ because I don't use Windows, so I have no good way to validate that theory.)
As I understand it, Noteoad++ is based on Scintilla, and Scintilla provides a mechanism to add custom lexers, using the protocol described in the file doc/Lexer.txt in the Scintilla source.
Basically, to make a flex-generated lexer process text using that protocol, you will either need to read the text to be scanned into a temporary buffer, or show yylex how to read the text (which means compiling your lexer with a custom YY_INPUT macro).
I'd go for the first option, because in order to customize YY_INPUT, you need to make sure that several values are visible in the functions which include expansions of YY_INPUT and, unfortunately, the authors of flex never really took that sort of need into account. (It could be done, though. I'm just avoiding the long description of how to do it.)
In order to provide the correct arguments to styler.ColourTo(), you'll need to track the current scintilla cursor position. To do that, initialise a cursor variable to startPos and increment it with cursor += yyleng in every action. Flex makes it easy to do something in every action: just define the macro YY_USER_ACTION. (NOTE: If you use yyless or yymore, you'll need to correct the cursor position in the corresponding actions.)
Our main language is English, so we use tr("Some english text") all over the source code.
We also plan to translate it to several different languages - no problem with that.
Our customer wants to get all phrases from the source code and proofread them.
Of course, we should put those phrases back after proofreading.
How can we accomplish that in a proper way? Maybe Qt Linguist allow to export/import embedded localizable texts?
I guess the customer can just translate English into English and then we can use that English translation, but it's weird.
I would go with Qt's lupdate utility (could be found in Qt's bin directory) that will extract all string literals from your sources into a xml (ts) file. The file can be opened with Linguist tool.
Note, that the utility considers only strings surrounded with tr() macro. Here is luptdate description:
lupdate is part of Qt's Linguist tool chain. It extracts translatable
messages from Qt UI files, C++, Java and JavaScript/QtScript source
code. Extracted messages are stored in textual translation source
files (typically Qt TS XML). New and modified messages can be merged
into existing TS files.
UPDATE:
Another alternative is keeping all string literals definitions in a separate source file and update it once customer has corrected all strings. I believe this happens not so frequently, or even only once, so it would not be worth of much effort with translations etc.
Finally, it looks like I will have to update phrases (embedded into source code) by hand. Actually, it shouldn't take too much time. If I have time to write a script on Python I will update this post.
UPDATE
So, I made everything "by hand" with a little help from Sublime Text 3.
Find all matches in repository folder using the following regular expression (.*)(tr\((\"(.+?)\")\))(.*)
Copy the search results into new document
Using the same regular expression do the search again and replace each match with \4 - this capture group represents text in tr("").
After receiving phrases from the customer after proofreading, it took 3-5 minutes to find differences with diff tool and update phrases in code.
Not a true-programmer way of resolving problems but worked for me and worked pretty fast!
I'm working on a logging system for my 2D engine, and I'm confused on how I should go about creating/editing the file, and how I should output that file.
I've learned that XML is more of a data carrier rather than a data displayer like HTML is. I've read that I can use XML to HTML converters. One method I've thought about is writing characters to a file in HTML.
Clarity on these matters is what I ask of you, stack overflow.
Creating an XML (or HTML) file doesn't need any special library. Straightforward string concatenation is usually good enough, you may have to encode some special characters (e.g. > into >.
But as Owen says, plain text is a log more common for log files. One reasonable compromise is comma-separated values in a text file, this gives you a little bit of structure without much overhead. For example, the Windows web server (IIS) uses this format by default, and if you have some fields that are output for each line such as timestamp or source filename and line number, this makes it easy to separate those out again.
Just about every log I've ever worked with has been pure text delimited by newlines. If you're going to depart from that, you may want to ask yourself what it is about your logging needs that you want to accomplish with markup.
If you must go the way of markup, I would suggest an XML format that contains a minimal set of markup that would be useful in your situation. You could use XML to capture structure in your log entries (timestamp, severity, and operational code, for example) that would be inconvenient to code for in HTML.
Note that you could also go hybrid and embed some XHTML tags in an XML element whose purpose is to capture displayable text, if you want.
The problem with XML or HTML files is that you cannot append at any time. You have to close the final tag (document tag) properly at the end of writing.
Therefore, it's not a popular format for logging.
For logging, I suggest using one of the existing log engines, such as Apache logger, or, John Torjo's boost log candidate. They will support log levels, runtime configuration, etc.
If you are considering writing logs in XML files, please, stop.
Log files should be simple plain text files, XML-izing it is introducing needless complexity. They are not structured data, they are meant to be read by people, not automated tools.
It all starts with XML logs, and then it goes downhill from there.
My Qt application should be able to create/open/save a single "Project" at once. What is the painless way to store project's settings in a file? Should it be XML or something less horrible?
Of course data to be stored in a file is a subject to change over time.
What I need is something like QSettings but bounded to a project in my application rather than to the whole application.
You can use QSettings to store data in a specific .ini file.
From the docs:
Sometimes you do want to access settings stored in a specific file or registry path. On all platforms, if you want to read an INI file directly, you can use the QSettings constructor that takes a file name as first argument and pass QSettings::IniFormat as second argument. For example:
QSettings settings("/home/petra/misc/myapp.ini",
QSettings::IniFormat);
I order to make it user editable, I would stick to plain text with one key = values by line, like in most of the Linux apps.
However this is only for the settings, not for the complete project's data which I suppose requires more complex structures.
So maybe JSON ?
Pro XML:
You can have a look at it in an editor
You can store any kind of string in any language in it (unicode support)
It's simple to learn
More than one program can read the same XML
It's easy to structure your data with XML. When you use key/value lists, for example, you'll run into problems when you need to save tree-like structures.
Contra XML
The result is somewhat bloated
Most programming languages (especially old ones like C++) have no good support for XML. The old XML APIs were designed in such a way that they could be implemented in any language (smallest common denominator). 'nuff said.
You need to understand the concept of "encoding" (or "charset"). While this may look trivial at first glance, there are some hidden issues which can bite you. So always test your code with some umlauts and even kanji (Japanese characters) to make sure you got it right.