xgettext with keyword that contains special characters

Question

How can keywords be escaped when passing the --keyword argument? We use static calls to fetch translations, i.e. in the form Language::getText('foo');

Answer 1

I’m afraid you only have three options:

1. Write your own custom tool to extract strings from this sort of code.
2. Realize you are using a gettext library that has certain ways of doing thing and use it as it was intended to be used, i.e. with some sane, simple function or macro instead of a verbose Language::getText method call.
3. Add support for this to xgettext and submit a patch to GNU gettext project.

Answer 2

I was looking for a solution to this as well; it looks (to my non-C-programming eyes) like xgettext uses colons as a separator internally. According to a comment in the code, "The characters between name and end should form a valid C identifier. A colon means an invalid parse in split_keywordspec()." So it's basically dumping anything with a colon in it as invalid.