Idea for an add-on: Ignore strings in .po files

[emmapeel2]

We have some websites with a quite primitive .po generator, and many times there are strings that should not be translated (like <table> or code snippets).

So, I have incorporated an ignore.pot file to the translation repositories, and when updating the .pot file I clean the strings from the ignore.pot file from the result with this command:

msgattrib --set-obsolete --only-file=ignore.pot contents.pot -o contents.pot

This way the strings are removed from the .pot file. When building the website, this strings are created again but as they don't have any translations they simply appear in the source language.

Maybe is a good idea to add this feature as an add-on?

[nijel]

• There is a key filter which does this think for monolingual files. I'm not sure if it's reasonable to introduce source string filtering as well because the filter is likely to be more complex there and it will be harder to debug. How do you define strings to be excluded?
• If you want solution in Weblate right now, you can use bulk edit add-on and mark such strings read-only.
• For Weblate I ended up scripting it externally, as this makes it way easier to debug: https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/blob/main/scripts/filter-docs-po.py

[emmapeel2]

I define the strings by adding them to a new .pot file, called ignore.pot, that sits in the repository along with the contents.pot file. Like this: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/translation/-/tree/communitytpo-contentspot/src?ref_type=heads