Mixed and nested structures

While simple messages are easy to extract, mixed and nested messages are not. But wuchale handles them seamlessly. When writing them in the .po files, it uses a simple convention that is easy to work with for translators.

Text mixed with expressions

These are created when extracting template literals and markup message with expressions in the middle. For example,

const msg = `Hello ${userName}, welcome to ${appName}!`

And

<p>Hello {userName}, welcome to ${appName}!</p>

Are both extracted into:

msgid "Hello {0}, welcome to {1}!"
msgstr ""

The expressions are converted into zero based numeric placeholders. Now the translator can rearrange anything as the language dictates and wuchale will use the numbers in the placeholders to know where to put what.

Nested content

When text is mixed with markup that contains other text or expressions, it is also handled gracefully.

<p>Welcome to <i>the app {appName}</i>, <b>{userName}</b>!</p>

This is extracted as:

msgid "Welcome to <0>the app {0}</0>, <1/>!"
msgstr ""

This example shows two behaviours wuchale has when handling nesting content.

• When the nested content contains only text or text mixed with something else, it is extracted in HTML tags with both opening and closing tags <0>...</0>.
• When it doesn’t contain any text, the whole thing is extracted as a self-closing tag <1/>. Because the translator doesn’t need to know what is inside the tag because it is not translatable. They can translated without being overwhelmed with unnecessary details.

Note: The numeric indices of the placeholders is within their immediate parent.