Is it possible to have hyphens in a yaml key for use in my I18n en.yml file?

Question

For example :

en:
  foobar-does-not-work: 'This is my value'

Then if I do :

t(foobar-does-not-work) # => returns nil

This will not parse in Ruby's yml. Is there some way to make it work though? My keys are based on URL's which have dashes ( - ) in them.

Answer 1

Which version of ruby are you using? Can you show us your code and the error?

It works for me:

> require 'yaml'
> YAML.load_file('foo.yml')
{"en"=>{"foobar-does-not-work"=>"This is my value"}} 

And it works when I add it to my en.yml:

> I18n.t('foobar-does-not-work')
=> "This is my value" 

Have you checked the value of I18n.locale?

Answer 2

I think you are just using the wrong key when calling the t method. Remove 'en' from the key. It should be:

t('foobar-does-not-work')

Answer 3

Clearly there is an underlying problem that needs to be ferreted out. There is very good tool which analyzes your i18n YAML as the Rails app, which I have found extremely helpful in debug.

Install and run this gem i18n-tasks: https://github.com/glebm/i18n-tasks.

To create a comprehensive report of the your i18n components:

$ i18n-tasks health

From their spec:

This gem analyses code statically for key usages, such as I18n.t('some.key'), in order to:

Report keys that are missing or unused.
Pre-fill missing keys, optionally from Google Translate.
Remove unused keys.
Thus addressing the two main problems of i18n gem design:

Missing keys only blow up at runtime.
Keys no longer in use may accumulate and introduce overhead, without you knowing it.

---

I'm not sure the gem was intended to be used as an i18n debug tool, but I have found it to be useful for debugging hard to find problems in i18n.