Re: Gettext bug when translating strings from iso88592-2

[Bruno Haible]

Tomasz Torcz wrote:
>  Program has strings in latin2 (iso-8859-2):

>         char *good = _("good");
>         char *bad = _("bąd"); /* contains characte in iso 8859-2 */
>
>         setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
>         textdomain("example");

There are two problems with your program:

1) You fetch the translations before having set the locale and textdomain;
therefore the _(...) here will do nothing.

2) You expect that gettext will somehow convert the msgid from iso-8859-2
(your source encoding) to utf-8 (the PO file's encoding). This is not
true: the gettext documentation says
  "Note that the MSGID argument to `gettext' is not subject to
character set conversion.  Also, when `gettext' does not find a
translation for MSGID, it returns MSGID unchanged - independently of
the current output character set.  It is therefore recommended that all
MSGIDs be US-ASCII strings."

A possible solution for you is to change your source code to UTF-8.
Another possible solution is to convert the msgid yourself from ISO-8859-2
to UTF-8 before passing it to the gettext function.

Bruno