msggrep on text from comments

[Martin Quinson]

Hello,

I found several problems in gettext 0.11.5 :

1) The existance of the -C flag to search in comments with msggrep is not
documented well in the documentation:

<<<<<<<<<<<
   MSGID-PATTERN or MSGSTR-PATTERN syntax:
              [-E | -F] [-e PATTERN | -f FILE]...

       PATTERNs  are basic regular expressions by default, or extended regular
       expressions if -E is given, or fixed strings if -F is given.

       -N, --location=SOURCEFILE
              select messages extracted from SOURCEFILE

       -M, --domain=DOMAINNAME
              select messages belonging to domain DOMAINNAME

       -K, --msgid
              start of patterns for the msgid

       -T, --msgstr
              start of patterns for the msgstr

       -E, --extended-regexp
              PATTERN is an extended regular expression

       -F, --fixed-strings
              PATTERN is a set of newline-separated strings

       -e, --regexp=PATTERN
              use PATTERN as a regular expression
>>>>>>>>>>>

msggrep --help is exactly as few informative as the man page.


2) Some example of use of msggrep would be very welcome in this page. For
   example:
   msggrep -C -F -e FIXME file.po
     will extract all entries with "FIXME" in the comments
     
   msggrep -K -F -e framebuffer -T -F -e framebuffer file.po
     will extract all entries using the word framebuffer without translating
     it (ie this word is present in the msgid and in the msgstr).

3) like 1,  if I do some syntax error (which is pretty easy since the
   syntax is so hard to figure), I get wrong error messages.
   
<<<<<<<<<<<
$ msggrep -F file.po
msggrep: option 'F' cannot be used before 'K' or 'T' has been specified
Try msggrep --help' for more information.
>>>>>>>>>>>

and what about the 'C' ?

4) Combining the result of several msggrep or msgattrib is very difficult,
   since all of them write the header of the file. For example, if I want
   the entries being either untranslated or fuzzy plus all entries having
   FIXME in their comments, I would have to do something like :

 (msgattrib --only-fuzzy file.po ;   \
  msgattrib --untranslated file.po ; \
  msggrep -C -F -e FIXME file.po) > output

Letting alone that this syntax is not really easy, the produced file won't
be correct, due to the presence of 3 headers.

Piping them to msguniq or msgcat does not help. Is it because the
dupplicated field is the header ? I have no idea about how to solve that
without introducing yet another option to the msg{attrib,grep} binaries.


Bye, Mt.

-- 
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retiendra la leçon pour la prochaine fois.
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