/ 
i18n-0.13
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/ i18n

NAME

i18n - Perl Internationalization Pragma

VERSION

This document describes version 0.13 of i18n, released May 1, 2019.

SYNOPSIS

In one-liners:

% export LANG=sp
% perl -Mi18n=/path/to/po-files/ -le 'print ~~"Hello, world"';
Hola, mundo

In your module:

use i18n "/path/to/po-files";
my $place = ~~'world';
print ~~"Hello, $world";

DESCRIPTION

Internationalization (abbreviated i18n) is the process of designing an application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions. The most basic task is to let your program know which strings are meant for human consumption and which strings are intended for the computer.

Strings for humans need to get localized (translated to the language of the human using your program) and strings for computers must not get translated.

Syntax

The i18n module gives you a remarkably simple way to mark strings that are intended for humans. All you do is put two tilde signs (~~) in front of every string that is intended to be translated. That's it. All the other details of localization are handled outside the program. Here are some examples:

my $str1 = ~~'The time is now';
my $str2 = ~~"$str1 for having a cow";
my $str3 = ~~qq{Wow! $str2};
my $str4 = ~~<<END;
How now.
Brown cow.
END

Think of the tilde signs as an indicator that you are looking for things that approximates the string in the user's language. To turn off the magic of ~~ lexically, just say:

no i18n;

One nice thing about this particular markup, is that you can completely turn off internationalization, by simply removing the use i18n; statement. The ~~ signs are actually valid Perl that just happen to not do anything in this context, and thus are constant-optimized away at compile time.

Implementation

When you say:

my $string = ~~"Bob is your uncle";

then $string really is an i18n::string object that is overloaded to stringify as a localized translation.

Currently, the magic is just a thin wrapper on Locale::Maketext::Simple, which makes it equivalent to this call:

my $string = loc("Bob is your uncle");

Similarly, this line:

my $string = ~~"$person is your uncle";

will be turned into this at runtime:

my $string = loc("[_1] is your uncle", $person);

CAVEATS

The authors of this module are not linguists. If you would like to help us define suitable i18n magic for your language, please send us an email.

SEE ALSO

Locale::Maketext::Simple, Locale::Maketext::Lexicon

AUTHORS

Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org>, Ingy döt Net <INGY@cpan.org>.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2016, 2019 by Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org>, Ingy döt Net <INGY@cpan.org>.

This software is released under the MIT license cited below.

The "MIT" License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.