gettextractor

CLI for extracting translation strings from application source files to a .PO (gettext) file for later translation. It uses babel under the hood to traverse AST tree and find all strings that appear in specific function calls.

Usage

Consider the following application source fragment:

    // src/utils.ts
    import __ from './translate';

    export function injectHeader () {
        const element = document.createElement('h1');
        element.innerText = __('Hello world!');

        document.appendChild(element);
    }

regardless of what __ function does, in an application development lifecycle, at some point you'll want to extract all translatable strings from source code and generate a file that'll want to send for translation. This tool is able to extract those strings from your whole application code to a single .po file.

To do that on the above file, do:

$ gettextractor --name __ --dir src --filter '.ts'

This will print the .PO file contents to standard output. See --out flag usage for info on how to save it to a file.

Plural forms

If necessary, you can also add plural form that will be added to msgid_plural in resulting .PO file using context object:

const text = __('Hello world', { pluralForm: 'Hello worlds' });

#: src/HelloWorld.ts:1:13
msgid "Hello world!"
msgid_plural "Hello worlds!"
msgstr[0] "Hello world!"

CLI flags

--name

Provide the name of a function that will be looked for during extraction.

--dir

Base directory name where all your source files are.

--filter

You can provide extensions list in the --filter flag to modify what files will get checked for presence of translation strings. For example, if you have a React application, you can do:

$ gettextractor --name __ --dir src --filter '.js,.jsx,.ts,.tsx'

--out (optional)

If you want to have the result saved to a file, provide its name as a value for this flag:

$ gettextractor --name __ --dir src --filter '.ts' --out en.po

--annotation (optional)

Sometimes, you may want to pass some information to future translators (reg. context, etc). In such case, you can do so by adding a comment direcly above the line with translation:

// TRANSLATORS: It's defining the greeting message.
const text = __('Hello world!');

This flag allows you to change the default TRANSLATORS prefix used for comments that will be passed to the resulting .po file, i.e.:

// CONTEXT: Custom info for translators.
/*
 * CONTEXT: I can also accept
 * multiline comment.
 */
const text = __('Hello world!');

$ gettextrator --name __ --dir src --filter '.ts' --annotation 'CONTEXT'

msgid ""
msgstr "Content-Type: text/plain\n"

# Custom info for translators.; I can also accept multiline comment.
#: src/HelloWorld.tsx:14:20
msgid "Hello world!"
msgstr "Hello world!"