gotext-tools

gotext-tools

A Go library and CLI toolkit for working with Gettext .po and .mo files. This project provides cross-platform tools for extracting, merging, and compiling translation files, with a focus on Go projects.

Features

✅ Cross-platform – Written in Go, works on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, Darwin(MacOS), Plan9, Solaris and DragonFly. 386, amd64, arm, arm64, ppc64, ppc64le, riscv64.

✅ Go-native support – Designed with Go projects in mind.
✅ Easy to Install – Pre-built binaries available, or build from source.

CLI Tools

Located in cli/, these tools provide command-line utilities for managing .po and .mo files.

gotext-tools

It is a wrapper of all the utilities that will be mentioned below, if you don't want to install all of them one by one, or you want to save disk space, I recommend you install this one.

Usage:

gotext-tools [tool] [option]... [arg]...

msgomerge

A cross-platform alternative to msgmerge, used for updating .po files with new translations while preserving existing ones.

Usage:

msgomerge [old.po] [new.po] -o [output.po]

More information here

msgofmt

A cross-platform alternative to msgfmt, used for compiling .po files into binary .mo files.

Usage:

msgofmt [input.po] -o [output.mo]

More information here

xgotext

A Go-compatible version of xgettext for extracting translatable strings from Go source code.

Usage:

xgotext -o [output.po] [file1.go] [file2.go] ...

More information here

📌 Coming Soon: More CLI tools for advanced Gettext operations.

Library

The core library is located in pkg/ and provides structured handling of .po and .mo files.

go/parse

Extracts Gettext-compatible strings from Go source code. Useful for generating translation templates.

Example:

package main

import (
  goparse"github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools/v2/pkg/go/parse"
  "fmt"
)

func main(){
  myGolangFile := `package main

  import "fmt" // Import strings are ignored!

  func MyFunc(){
    a := 10
    "My anonymous string"

    switch "a"{
      case "b":
      case "c":
    }
  }`

  file,err := goparse.FromString(myGolangFile,"my-file.go")
  if err != nil{
    panic(err)
  }

  fmt.Println(file.Entries)
}

po

The main package for working with .po files. Includes:

• Entry & Entries – Structured representation of translation entries.
• File
• Sorting & Comparison – Easily organize and compare translations.

package main

import (
  "os"
  "github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools/v2/pkg/po"
  "github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools/v2/pkg/po/compiler"
  "github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools/v2/pkg/po/parse"
)


func main(){
  def,_ := parse.Mo("es.mo")
  ref,_ := parse.Po("en.pot")
  if def.Equal(ref){
    return
  }

  merged := po.Merge(def.Entries,ref.Entries)
  merged = merged.CleanFuzzy().CleanDuplicates()
  compiler.PoToWriter(merged,os.Stdout)
}

po/compile

Compiles parsed .po files into .mo (binary) or updated .po files.

package main

import (
  "os"
  "github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools/v2/pkg/po"
  "github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools/v2/pkg/po/compile"
)

func main(){
  myFile := &po.File{
    Name: "My File!",
    Entries: po.Entries{
      {
        ID: "Hello World!",
        Str: "Hola Mundo!",
      },
      {
        ID: "Bye World!",
        Str: "Adios Mundo!",
      },
    },
  }

  compile.PoToWriter(myFile,os.Stdout)
}

po/parse

Parsers for reading .po and .mo files into structured Go objects.

package main

import (
  "github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools/v2/pkg/po/parse"
)

func main(){
  myPoFile := `msgid "hello"
msgstr "hola"

#, fuzzy
msgid "world"
msgstr "mundo"`

  myFile,_ := parse.PoFromString(myPoFile,"my_po_file.po")
}

Installation

From Source

git clone https://github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools
cd gotext-tools
make local-install app=gotext-tools

Or...

git clone https://github.com/Tom5521/gotext-tools
cd gotext-tools
make go-install-gotext-tools

Pre-built Binaries

Check the Releases page for pre-compiled executables.

Notes

Recommendation: the version of this module is go1.18, it will work fine, but if you need better performance I recommend you to use go1.21 as minimum, since several internal functions are manual implementations (since for go1.18 they haven't added some libraries yet) so they are a bit slower than the official implementations.

Here is an example with benchmarks:

Go 1.24.3

$ just bench ./pkg/po/compile/mo_benchmark_test.go
goos: linux
goarch: amd64
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz
BenchmarkMoCompiler/WithHashTable-4               169875              5946 ns/op
BenchmarkMoCompiler/WithoutHashTable-4            218752              5495 ns/op
PASS
ok      command-line-arguments  2.350s

Go 1.18

$ just gocmd=go1.18 bench ./pkg/po/compile/mo_benchmark_test.go
goos: linux
goarch: amd64
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz
BenchmarkMoCompiler/WithHashTable-4               135243              7897 ns/op
BenchmarkMoCompiler/WithoutHashTable-4            161006              7837 ns/op
PASS
ok      command-line-arguments  2.507s

I have to note that this only applies to the library, the CLI binaries use a module with version 1.23 and are compiled with the latest version of golang, so these problems do not affect them.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

License

This project is open-source under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.