Table of Contents
Ocaml-gettext is a library to support string translation in OCaml. It provides a simple interface to help programmers and translators to create programs that can support different languages. This allows the internationalisation of programs.
OCaml-gettext provides two main functionalities:
translate English strings into localised strings ( depending on which gettext data are installed ),
convert charset from the one used by the translator into the charset of the user.
The library is build according three points of view:
for the programmer: this library provides functions that can be used in OCaml,
for the translator: this library provides a standard file format ( PO file ) to help the translator,
for the user: this library provides a set of command line options to set the language and the charset.
Ocaml-gettext was initially only a wrapper of gettext. It comes with a patch against the source of xgettext to add support of the OCaml language. As i already used this approach, i was convinced that this library should be better integrated by using more advanced features of OCaml ( such as camlp4 ).
As a result of porting gettext to ocaml-gettext, we have :
a library that can understood the native format of gettext file ( MO file ),
two implementations: a wrapper around gettext and a pure OCaml implementation using camomile,
ocaml-gettext: a command line tool to help you to extract, to merge and to install gettext data.