Jörn Reder wrote:

> This way Locale::TextDomain sees
> utf-8 characters only in the message id's and everything should just
> work.

Unfortunately I was wrong with that assumption... :(

I changed my tiny test program to use utf-8 messages consistently, but
Locale::TextDomain obviously has some trouble with the utf-8 flag of the
strings in question...

I changed the xgettext --from-charset back to utf-8 again. Of course
that didn't changed the .po file, since the message id's were utf-8
anyway. Just for the record the interesting portion of my en.po file:

  #: ../test.pl:16
  msgid "Datei öffnen"
  msgstr "Open file"

  #: ../test.pl:17
  msgid "Datei oeffnen"
  msgstr "Open file"

The test program now uses utf-8 message id's:

  use strict;
  use lib 'lib';
  use Locale::TextDomain ("test");

  main: {
    print __"Datei öffnen","\n";
    print __"Datei oeffnen","\n";
  }

These are the test runs: (my terminal is iso-8859-1)

  % LC_MESSAGES="en_US.ISO-8859-1" perl test.pl
  Open file
  Open file

Great. English translation works, but the C mode not:

  % LC_MESSAGES="C" perl test.pl
  Datei öffnen
  Datei oeffnen

Locale::TextDomain misses setting the utf-8 flag on the returned string.
If the utf-8 flag was set, Perl had converted the output to iso-8859-1
when printing to my iso-8859-1 terminal.

Ok, but the test program really should "use utf8", since it contains
utf-8 encoded literals now. I tried that:

  use strict;
  use utf8;
  use lib 'lib';
  use Locale::TextDomain ("test");

  main: {
    print "Datei öffnen","\n";
    print __"Datei öffnen","\n";
    print __"Datei oeffnen","\n";
  }

(the first line should print a correct iso-8859-1 encoded "Datei öffnen"
without any translation, just to prove that Perl's iso-8859-1 STDOUT
recoding works).

These are the results of this program version:

  % LC_MESSAGES="en_US.ISO-8859-1" perl test.pl
  Datei öffnen
  Datei öffnen
  Open file

We see: Perl works as expected, but translation doesn't work anymore.
Why?

  % LC_MESSAGES="C" perl test.pl
  Datei öffnen
  Datei öffnen
  Datei oeffnen

Even passing through in C mode destroys the utf-8 flag, so I get utf-8
characters on my iso-8859-1 terminal.

It looks Locale::TextDomain can't handle utf-8 encoded messages :( In C
mode it always returns strings without the utf-8 flag set, even if the
input had the flag. And translation doesn't work when the input has the
utf-8 flag set, although this should be the right thing if we're
programming consistently with utf-8 and Perl >= 5.8.

Is this behaviour intended, resp it's no bug but a feature I just don't
understand? ;)

Regards,

Joern

--
Think, before you code.