gettext: Long Lines

1 
1 15.5.18.8 How To Grok with Long Lines
1 .....................................
1 
1    The necessity of long messages can often lead to a cumbersome or
1 unreadable coding style.  Perl has several options that may prevent you
1 from writing unreadable code, and ‘xgettext’ does its best to do
1 likewise.  This is where the dot operator (the string concatenation
1 operator) may come in handy:
1 
1      print gettext ("This is a very long"
1                     . " message that is still"
1                     . " readable, because"
1                     . " it is split into"
1                     . " multiple lines.\n");
1 
1    Perl is smart enough to concatenate these constant string fragments
1 into one long string at compile time, and so is ‘xgettext’.  You will
1 only find one long message in the resulting POT file.
1 
1    Note that the future Perl 6 will probably use the underscore (‘_’) as
1 the string concatenation operator, and the dot (‘.’) for dereferencing.
1 This new syntax is not yet supported by ‘xgettext’.
1 
1    If embedded newline characters are not an issue, or even desired, you
1 may also insert newline characters inside quoted strings wherever you
1 feel like it:
1 
1      print gettext ("<em>In HTML output
1      embedded newlines are generally no
1      problem, since adjacent whitespace
1      is always rendered into a single
1      space character.</em>");
1 
1    You may also consider to use here documents:
1 
1      print gettext <<EOF;
1      <em>In HTML output
1      embedded newlines are generally no
1      problem, since adjacent whitespace
1      is always rendered into a single
1      space character.</em>
1      EOF
1 
1    Please do not forget that the line breaks are real, i.e. they
1 translate into newline characters that will consequently show up in the
1 resulting POT file.
1