[PyQt] Docs on how pylupdate4 finds strings?

[Phil Thompson]

On Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:28:26 -0500, Dave Peterson <dpeterson at enthought.com>
wrote:
> I'm having trouble getting pylupdate4 (version 4.5.1) to detect strings 
> that need translation in my python files.   And after numerous searches, 
> I can't seem to find any docs explaining how the tool goes about finding 
> strings that need translation, so I'm not even sure how to go about 
> debugging things.
> 
> Ideally, I'd like my project to have a util.py module containing a tr() 
> function that I can then use throughout the rest of my code.   This 
> module might look something like:
> 
>     from PyQt4 import QtGui
>     def tr(context, text):
>        return QtGui.QApplication.translate(context, text, None, 
> QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)
> 
> And then in any other project module I could simply do:
> 
>     from util import tr
>     CONTEXT='MainMenu'
>     menu1 = Menu(name=tr(CONTEXT, u'File'), ....)
>     menu2 = Menu(name=tr(CONTEXT, u'View'), ....)
> 
>     etc.
> 
> However, for the life of me, I can't get pylupdate4 to detect the 
> strings 'File' and 'View'.   I've even tried "inlining" by doing 
> something like:
> 
>     menu1 = Menu(name=QtGui.QApplication.translate('MainMenu', u'File'), 
> ...)
> 
> but that doesn't work either.
> 
> 
> Can anyone offer advice or point me at some docs for how pylupdate4 does 
> it's scanning?

pylupdate is a hack of lupdate so it's not too clever handling Python. I
think there are two problems...

Make sure the translatable text is the first argument to tr().

Don't use unicode strings (ie. drop the u).

Phil