String constants are sequences of characters enclosed in double
quotes. In non-English speaking environments, it is possible to
mark strings in the AWK program as requiring translation to the
local natural language. Such strings are marked in the AWK
program with a leading underscore ('_'). For example,
gawk 'BEGIN { print "hello, world" }'
always prints hello, world. But,
gawk 'BEGIN { print _"hello, world" }'
might print bonjour, monde in France.
There are several steps involved in producing and running a
localizable AWK program.
1. Add a BEGIN action to assign a value to the TEXTDOMAIN
variable to set the text domain to a name associated with
your program:
BEGIN { TEXTDOMAIN = "myprog" }
This allows gawk to find the .gmo file associated with
your program. Without this step, gawk uses the messages
text domain, which likely does not contain translations
for your program.
2. Mark all strings that should be translated with leading
underscores.
3. If necessary, use the dcgettext() and/or bindtextdomain()
functions in your program, as appropriate.
4. Run gawk --gen-pot -f myprog.awk > myprog.pot to generate
a .pot file for your program.
5. Provide appropriate translations, and build and install
the corresponding .gmo files.
The internationalization features are described in full detail in
GAWK: Effective AWK Programming.
