Repository navigation
poedit generates invalid unexpected characters #866
Description
I am trying to translate locale\en to locale\fr in a xliff file. This cause poedit to generate a file that is not accepted by crowdin.
Here is the file:
changes_NOK.zip
See line 5777: the "\f" is interpreted as .
For reference, the file where I have left the translation to locale\en is here:
changes_OK.zip
Activity
CyrilleB79 commentedon Sep 23, 2024
Cc @michaelDCurran, responsible for NVDA's translation framework upgrade where this issue has been noticed.
michaelDCurran commentedon Sep 24, 2024
It looks like that input field in poedit excepts
\as an escape chracter, and generates control codes for sequences such as\f\tetc. For instance, typing\tresults in a physical tab character in the saved po or xliff file.Typing a
\\(double back slash) results in the desired behaviour of producing one back slash.So in your example, in Poedit, you'll have to type
locale\\fr.I also made a contrived testcase where the source string was
c:\folderand tested how Poedit copied the source as the initial translation withcontrol+b. In this case, it resulted inc:\\folderbeing set in the input field, which is what I would expect based on the above.So in short, the expectation is that translators need to escape any literal back slash characters in that input field.
Though as that is a richEdit50 control, I wonder whether it might be better for translators if tab / newline / formfeed were just handled visually, which would remove the need for back slash escapes entirely.
vslavik commentedon Sep 24, 2024
As @michaelDCurran says, this behaves as intended. Special characters and placeholders are visually indicated in the translation field; in your example,
\fwas highlighted as a single unit, implying its special meaning.The actual bug is that
\is not escaped in the source text field.I do wonder if the highlighting is conveyed by screenreaders and if not (as I suspect), how to indicate placeholders in a11y context, though...
That would be ideal, yes — highlight newlines and strange whitespace with typographic marks that are not verbarim part of the edited text. In addition to reducing confusion, it would greatly simplify the code.
Last time I checked this, I knew how to do this on macOS, but not on Windows. It sounds like you know this is doable, could you give me some pointers on how?