Tutorial

SimpleTranslations is a package to do simple translation through a ini file.

The usage is simple.

In a .ini file, there are described the different messages for different languages.
It is selected the language to which the messages should be translated. If there was not selected any, the default language is selected.
The get_msg is used.

Syntax

An example of the message file is the following:

[config]
languages=es,fr,en
default=en

[en]
hi=Hi
[es]
hi=Hola a todos
bye=Adios

[fr]
hi=Bonjour

The file contains two type of sections:

Section config
Section for each language

Section config

This section is special, and it is the section by default, it contains two variables:

languages: List of languages in the file, optional.
default: Language by default.

Section for each language

The other sections contains the translations of each message to a specific language. The name of the section is the language name.

This section is composed by several lines with the format id=message, in which id is the identification of the message using in the source code, and message is the message translated. Not quotation marks are required. The initial and final spaces in id and message are ignored, but the spaces in the middle of the messages are maintained.

Usage

This package can be used saving the messages in a MessagesTranslator variable, with the function loadmsgs. This function can be used with the filename of with the file already open. Later, the function get_msg is used to receive, from an id of a message, the translation. The language is selected through set_languages, when none is indicated, a default language (indicated in the file) is chosen.

SimpleTranslations.loadmsgs — Function

loadmsgs(file, strict_mode)

read the file with the message list.

Arguments

file::IO: file to get the messages.
strict_mode::Bool=false: strict mode (default=false).

source

loadmsgs(filename; strict_mode=false)

read the file with the message list.

Arguments

filename::AbstractString: name of the file to get the messages.
strict_mode::Bool=false: strict mode (default=false).

source

SimpleTranslations.set_language! — Function

set_language!(conf::MessagesTranslator, lang::AbstractString)

update the current language

source

set_language!(lang)

Set the language to lang in future messages.

Arguments lang language identification.

Example

set_language!("es")

source

SimpleTranslations.get_msg — Function

get_msg(conf::MessagesTranslator, id::AbstractString)

return the id message translate to current language

source

Get the translated message in the global Translater

Arguments

id: identificator of the message.

source

Example

using SimpleTranslations

fname = joinpath(dirname(pathof(SimpleTranslations)), "..", "test", "test.ini")
msgs = loadmsgs(fname)
println(get_msg(msgs, "hi"))
set_language!(msgs, "es")
println(get_msg(msgs, "hi"))
set_language!(msgs, "fr")
println(get_msg(msgs, "hi"))

Hi
Hola a todos
Bonjour

With global information

With the previous mechanism, in order to translate any message, the MessagesTranslator should be passed through the different functions calls.

To simplify the usage, there is another way to use the function, inspired in the Random module in the standard library, in which there are two versions of each function, one with the random generator, and another without the random generator (in that case a global variable is automatically used).

using SimpleTranslations

fname = joinpath(dirname(pathof(SimpleTranslations)), "..", "test", "test.ini")
loadmsgs!(fname)
println(get_msg("hi")) # Hi
set_language!("es")
println(get_msg("hi")) # Hola a todos
set_language!("fr")
println(get_msg("hi"))
 # Bonjour

Hi
Hola a todos
Bonjour

Strict mode

In order to have a better control of the messages in the different languages, this module has a strict mode, that can be indicated when the loadmsgs is used.

In this strict mode, it is automatically checked that all messages are available in all languages, and that there are translations to all languages indicated in languages option.