mo.lua, parser of MO files

Implementation by J.Jørgen von Bargen was sent to lua-l mailing list as public domain.

Installation

$ luarocks install mo

Usage

-- load this module
mo = require 'mo'

-- load .mo file with translations
-- returns translating function on success
-- returns nil, 'error message' on failure
_ = mo('russian.mo')

-- translate from English into Russian
print(_("hello")) -- prints "привет"
-- the function returns its argument if it can't translate it
print(_("unknown phrase")) -- prints "unknown phrase"

Unit tests

You need busted and gettext to run unit tests.

$ busted

See also

Let us translate some Lua project into Russian.

$ xgettext -p ru -s -j --language=Lua *.lua --from-code utf-8

This command creates (or adds to) file ru/messages.po. It finds texts like _("text") in source files and adds them to .po file.

There are a lot of programs to translate .po file. One of them is poedit.

To compile .po to .mo, run the following command:

$ msgfmt ru/messages.po -o ru/messages.mo

This module is used to parse .mo file from Lua.

GNU gettext