How to I mark an empty translation (msgstr) as translated in po gettext files?

Question

I found that is the translation for a string (msgid) is empty all gettext tools will consider the string as untranslated.

Is there a workaround for this? I do want to have an empty string as the translation for this item.

Answer 1

As this seems to be a big design flaw in the gettext specification, I decided to use: Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH SPACE' (U+200B) inside these fields.