How to generate a new .pot template from a translated .po file

Question

Having started off with an incomplete gettext .pot file, the resulting .po translations file now includes a large number of translation strings that were not originally in the .pot file.

How can I backwards generate a .pot file for other languages (strings with blank translation entries) from a translated .po file?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I think that the cleanest approach would be to use the solution suggested by Peter Eisentraut:

msgfilter -i xx.po -o new.pot true

You can also keep the gettext header by adding the --keep-header before the final true argument. In this case you need to check the resulting header because it may contain language-specific instructions (like the number of plural rules).

For Windows users: in order to use this approach, you need a program that acts like true (that is, it does nothing except running succesflully), like the true for Windows I wrote for exactly this reason.

Answer 2

You can use something like this:

msgfilter -i xx.po -o new.pot true

msgfilter applies a program to all translations in a file, and true is just some program that doesn't output anything for any input.

You will probably need to massage the header comment a bit after this to make it really look like a fresh POT file.

Answer 3

This took ages to figure out a way of doing it, but in the end I found a solution using Notepad++. From the Search|Replace... menu I was able to Replace All with a regular expression.

Find: msgstr ".*"

Replace with: msgstr ""

Answer 4

You don't. You generate the .pot file from the source code. msgmerge then takes the new .pot file and the existing .po file, and merges old entries into the new file.