Re: po files: invalid multibyte sequence

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 6/11/06, Fernando Apesteguía <fernando apesteguia gmail com> wrote:
> I write to explain my problem with some translation files. I'm using Anjuta,
> when some of my project translators send me the translation files, I added
> them to the project, but when I try to generate the distribution I get these
> errors:
>
> "invalid multibyte sequence"

Most probably this problem is because somewhere along the way
something converted the po files from their original UTF-8 encoding to
some other legacy encoding (like latin1). As the files' headers still
specify that the files are in UTF-8 encoding, the gettext tools
rightfully complain that the files, although being specified as being
valid UTF-8, contain invalid UTF-8 characters.

You did not tell us *how* your translators send you the files; if they
send them to you by mail, it could be that some mailer software along
the way munged the encoding. A workaround is to send the files
compressed, as that will preserve the encoding, since they are then
treated as binary files and are hopefully left as-is by mailer
software.

I do not know if Anjuta supports working with UTF-8 files; if that's
not the case, that may very well be the problem.


> I noticed that some characters are odd for my spanish configuration. Here
> reaches my question:
>
> How to test the different translation files? Should I install in my
> distribution every language that I wanted to test? Is there other way?
> If I don't fix this, I can't generate the distribution package

I'm not sure I understand your question.
If you want to test if the po files are syntactically valid, a simple
"msgfmt -cv file.po" should do.


Christian