Looking for people's experience with po files.

[VirginSnow at vfemail.net]

> Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:14:13 -0400
> From: Dan Coutu <coutu at snowy-owl.com>

> po files are a part of the gettext solution for handling 
> internationalization (i18n).

Good explanation of gettext <snipped>...

> part of what gettext handles by default. The trick there is to use 
> gettext to obtain the translation and then do string processing (your 
> language's equivalent of sprintf) in order to do the variable 
> substitution. There are, however,  potential pitfalls with this logic. 
> Not all languages place words in the same order. What is one language 
> might be "You have 10 items in your shopping cart worth $50 total" might 
> in another language read more like "Your total of $50 is for item count 10".

Most versions of printf will allow you to rearrange the order in which
conversion specifiers consume arguments by using "%n$" where you would
normally use "%".  Example:

printf("number1 is %2$d, and number2 is %1$d.\n", number2, number1);

does the same thing as

printf("number1 is %d, and number2 is %d.\n", number1, number2);