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I18N shell

The i18n features of CakePHP use po files as their translation source. This makes them easily to integrate with tools like poedit and other common translation tools.

The i18n shell provides a quick and easy way to generate po template files. These templates files can then be given to translators so they can translate the strings in your application. Once you have translations done, pot files can be merged with existing translations to help update your translations.

Generating POT files

POT files can be generated for an existing application using the extract command. This command will scan your entire application for __() style function calls, and extract the message string. Each unique string in your application will be combined into a single POT file:

./Console/cake i18n extract

The above will run the extraction shell. In addition to extracting strings in __() methods, validation messages in models will be extracted as well. The result of this command will be the file app/Locale/default.pot. You use the pot file as a template for creating po files. If you are manually creating po files from the pot file, be sure to correctly set the Plural-Forms header line.

Generating POT files for plugins

You can generate a POT file for a specific plugin using:

./Console/cake i18n extract --plugin <Plugin>

This will generate the required POT files used in the plugins.

Model validation messages

You can set the domain to be used for extracted validation messages in your models. If the model already has a $validationDomain property, the given validation domain will be ignored:

./Console/cake i18n extract --validation-domain validation_errors

You can also prevent the shell from extracting validation messages:

./Console/cake i18n extract --ignore-model-validation

Excluding folders

You can pass a comma separated list of folders that you wish to be excluded. Any path containing a path segment with the provided values will be ignored:

./Console/cake i18n extract --exclude Test,Vendor

Skipping overwrite warnings for existing POT files

New in version 2.2.

By adding --overwrite, the shell script will no longer warn you if a POT file already exists and will overwrite by default:

./Console/cake i18n extract --overwrite

Extracting messages from the CakePHP core libraries

New in version 2.2.

By default, the extract shell script will ask you if you like to extract the messages used in the CakePHP core libraries. Set --extract-core to yes or no to set the default behavior.

./Console/cake i18n extract --extract-core yes

or

./Console/cake i18n extract --extract-core no

Create the tables used by TranslateBehavior

The i18n shell can also be used to initialize the default tables used by the TranslateBehavior:

./Console/cake i18n initdb

This will create the i18n table used by translate behavior.