ResourceBundle

ResourceBundle is a package that manages internationalization / localization (i18n / l10n) of string resources. It is inspired by Java's ResourceBundle and accepts the same format as a Java PropertyResourceBundle.

Note: ResourceBundle is not the pythonic way of internationalization / localization. This package is only intended to be used if you absolutely have to work with ResourceBundle files or need a quick working way when porting from Java.

For information on how to do internationalization in python, see the official documentation. You can use the ResourceBundle.Converter.to_gettext() method to convert your ResourceBundle files to gettext po files.

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Installation

The ResourceBundle module can be downloaded from PyPI:

# Linux / macOS
$  python3 -m pip install ResourceBundle

# Windows
>  py -m pip install ResourceBundle

Usage

Assuming you come from Java, you are probably familiar with the ResourceBundle file format. If not, you can read about it here.

Get a ResourceBundle instance is by using ResourceBundle.get_bundle(name, locale).

import ResourceBundle

bundle = ResourceBundle.get_bundle("Strings", "en")

# It is now possible to get a resource with the get() method
bundle.get("key")

If the key could not be found in the ResourceBundle the parent ResourceBundles will be searched until a matching key was found. If the key is not present in any of its parents a ResourceBundle.exceptions.NotInResourceBundleError will be raised.

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gettext

The ResourceBundle module can convert ResourceBundle files to gettext pot / po files. This can be done by using the ResourceBundle.Converter.to_gettext() method.

from ResourceBundle import Converter

# convert all .properties files in the current directory to .po files
Converter.to_gettext(".", ".")

Note however that this step is obsolete if you are using gettext properly as this will include automatically extracting strings from your source code with the help of a library like Babel with its pybabel tool. The function is only intended as a head start to keep existing translations.