nova/doc/source/devref/il8n.rst
Lorin Hochstein 809a71822c Added RST docs on how to use gettext.
Added a page to the RST documentation about gettext usage
for internationalization.

Change-Id: I2b3b25ad3ab5f3d41b5298f6bad18b216644eeed
2011-11-16 20:19:26 -05:00

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1.3 KiB
ReStructuredText

Internationalization
====================
nova uses `gettext <http://docs.python.org/library/gettext.html>`_ so that
user-facing strings such as log messages appear in the appropriate
language in different locales.
To use gettext, make sure that the strings passed to the logger are wrapped
in a ``_()`` function call. For example::
LOG.debug(_("block_device_mapping %s"), block_device_mapping)
If you have multiple arguments, the convention is to use named parameters.
It's common to use the ``locals()`` dict (which contains the names and values
of the local variables in the current scope) to do the string interpolation.
For example::
label = ...
sr_ref = ...
LOG.debug(_('Introduced %(label)s as %(sr_ref)s.') % locals())
If you do not follow the project conventions, your code may cause the
LocalizationTestCase.test_multiple_positional_format_placeholders test to fail
in nova/tests/test_localization.py.
The ``_()`` function is brought into the global scope by doing::
import gettext
gettext.install("nova", unicode=1)
In general, you shouldn't need to add these to any nova files, since the lines
are present in ``nova/__init__.py``. However, if this code is missing, it may
result in an error that looks like like::
NameError: name '_' is not defined