NAME

Locale::Maketext::Cookbook - recipes for using Locale::Maketext

INTRODUCTION

This is a work in progress. Not much progress by now :-)

ONESIDED LEXICONS

    Adapted from a suggestion by Dan Muey

It may be common (for example at your main lexicon) that the hash keys and values coincide. Like that

    q{Hello, tell me your name} 
      => q{Hello, tell me your name}

It would be nice to just write:

    q{Hello, tell me your name} => ''

and have this magically inflated to the first form. Among the advantages of such representation, that would lead to smaller files, less prone to mistyping or mispasting, and handy to someone translating it which can simply copy the main lexicon and enter the translation instead of having to remove the value first.

That can be achieved by overriding init in your class and working on the main lexicon with code like that:

    package My::I18N;
    ...

    sub init {
        my $lh = shift; # a newborn handle
        $lh->SUPER::init();
        inflate_lexicon(\%My::I18N::en::Lexicon);
        return;
    }

    sub inflate_lexicon {
        my $lex = shift;
        while (my ($k, $v) = each %$lex) {
            $v = $k if !defined $v || $v eq '';
        }
    }

Here we are assuming My::I18N::en to own the main lexicon.

There are some downsides here: the size economy will not stand at runtime after this init() runs. But it should not be that critical, since if you don't have space for that, you won't have space for any other language besides the main one as well. You could do that too with ties, expanding the value at lookup time which should be more time expensive as an option.