strings.po

Quote from LybsterKodi

I'm using Favourites to list the series currently being watched (right now: Robin's Nest, The Saint, Only Fools and Horses, Homeland). Itis doing what I want and I thought I'd change "Favourites" to "Watching". No problem with Home.xml but strings.po in the skin (eg "Add to Favourites") is giving me trouble. I can edit strings.po with Notepad++ but a) I end up with a much larger file (16kb -> 553 kb) and b) it doesn't work.

It seems to work if I edit strings.po in the Kodi system rather than the skin. I don't want to do this because of implications for upgrading.

.po files are plaintext source files used in translations. Any normal gettext enabled app will be reading .mo files.

Recompile mo file after editing po.

msgfmt -o strings.mo -c strings.po

There are dedicated .po file editors on this planet.

If your text is coming from US English interface, you can't change it by updating .po/.mo. US English is normally base language.

Quote from LybsterKodi

Sorry, whilst I'm sure that made sense to you, to me (primarily Windows) its gibberish. Any chance of a translation?

.po files are gettext translation files. You can edit them on Windows with poedit. You can find that program on google. I don't want to put links to external third party sites on forum.

Example of gettext is below.

----

msgid "Favourites"
msgstr "Favoritter"

---
You are supposed to edit only msgstr part. msgid is base text. Changing msgid in strings.po does nothing unless you want to spend your time changing original text and then updating every strings.po file to match your changes in source files. Gettext translations are not supposed to be managed that way. They have whole toolkit for extracting strings from sources and updating .po file with string changes.

Checked how stuff looks like on Kodi/Libreelec and my understanding of gettext is bit outdated. Kodi genz brainiacs decided to go with uncompiled translations.