[bug #58356] xgettext does not escape special characters in comments

[Guido Flohr]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58356>

                 Summary: xgettext does not escape special characters in
comments
                 Project: GNU gettext
            Submitted by: gflohr
            Submitted on: Tue 12 May 2020 10:53:19 AM UTC
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

I have a C source file "two\nlines.c" (with an embedded newline character in
the name):

$ cat 'two
lines.c'
gettext("Hello, world!\n");
$ xgettext 'two
lines.c' 
$ msgfmt messages.po 
messages.po: warning: Charset "CHARSET" is not a portable encoding name.
                      Message conversion to user's charset might not work.
messages.po:21: keyword "lines" unknown
messages.po:21:6: syntax error
msgfmt: found 2 fatal errors
$ cat messages.po
# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2020-05-12 11:52+0300\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <address@hidden>\n"
"Language: \n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=CHARSET\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

#: /tmp/two
lines.c:1
msgid "Hello, world!\n"
msgstr ""

Similarly, commas should be escaped, so that a source file "foo.c:42, bar.c"
would not result in two references.

It is, of course, not a valuable feature to be able to process filenames with
embedded commas or newlines. But the current state is that xgettext produces a
file without errors or warnings that msgfmt cannot parse.

A simple solution would be to just throw a fatal error for such cases.




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