Translation comparison tools for PO format?

Question

I am using POEdit to modify the localization file of some projects.

Unfortunately it seems not able to do comparisons with different versions. Do you now if it does exists a comparison tool for Windows that support PO format?

Answer 1

Searching for basically the same in 2016, here is what I found:

• using podiff, as suggested in this SO question, did not work for me: POEdit apparently put some characters in the po file that podiff reported as errors
• I ended up using the standard gettext tools in Cygwin - this can be an overkill to install just for this task, but I already had Cygwin installed (it is handy for various tasks, eyspecially text editing and transformation). It is the package gettext-devel. Diffs can be then performed using the various msgxxx commands, for example:

msgcomm file1.po file2.po -o common.po

for strings with common msgids in two files, with translations taken from file1.po.

See the particular command help (e.g. msgcomm --help) for more information

Answer 2

I can suggest a tool as alternative to Poedit, it's http://poeditor.com/ in which you can create more projects and compare the translation files. It also has the option of setting a reference language from other translations you have on the project, which shows the other language under your original strings, so that you can compare.

Answer 3

You may want to try BeyondCompare. I don't know whether it is suitable for PO files, but it may also get "trained" for such files. I know that the strings are often split into multiple lines, which may cause some problems. Otherwise, as the PO files are plain text files (in UTF-8 usually), this should be easy.

You may also want to write some perl script for this. I remember I wrote something to take a PO file and produce a printable document with the joined lines.

The Beyond Compare software is available here: http://www.scootersoftware.com/moreinfo.php

I understand that plug-ins can be written for Beyond Compare.

Have a great day :-)