Using Rails’ New I18n Support in Real Life: Part the Fourth

December 16th, 2008 By: Daniel

So after tediously going through your entire site and extracting all displayed strings to a separate translation file, how do you know you didn’t miss something somewhere? My solution was to create a quick rake task that machine translates my English yaml file to something else. A quick sudo aptitude install bsdgames and I had pig latin at my fingertips. So I switched to that and browsed through the site and looked for anything that hadn’t changed. And I found quite a bit of stuff that I had missed.

# lib/tasks/pig.rake
desc "Creates a config/locales/pig-US.yml from config/locales/en-US.yml"
task :pig => :environment do
  DEFAULT_LOCALE = 'en-US'
  File.open(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'config', 'locales', 'pig-US.yml'), "w") do |fout|
    File.readlines(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'config', 'locales', "#{DEFAULT_LOCALE}.yml")).each do |line|
      unless line =~ /"/
        fout.puts line.sub(DEFAULT_LOCALE, 'pig-US')
      else
        key, *translation = line.split(':')
        translation = translation.join(':')
        translation.split(/(".*?")/).each do |quote|
          if quote =~ /"/
            quote.gsub!('"', '')
            string = quote.split(/(\{\{.*?\}\})/).map do |s|
              (s =~ /\{\{/) ? s : `echo "#{s.gsub('$', '\$')}" | pig`.chomp
            end
            translation.sub!(quote, string.join)
          end
        end
        fout.puts "#{key}:#{translation}"
      end
    end
  end
end

P.S. Note to anyone that actually tries to use this: This is just a quick and dirty script and will probably require some modification to work in your situation. In particular it requires all the strings you want translated to be within double quotes.