i added an option that make pygettext consider certain
multi-line strings as single-line strings.  If you're
using an editor like kbabel, it's nice, you don't see
the newlines.  This comes really handy for strings to
be used as HTML, where line breaks don't matter (and
I'm sure for many other uses).

You can select which keywords trigger this special
extraction.  All the other gettext tools work normally.
 Default behaviour does not change.

I use it something like this:

POTCMD = pygettext.py \
	--verbose --extract-all --no-default-keywords \
	--keyword-single=_ --keyword-single=N_ \
	--keyword=__
...

pot:
	$(POTCMD) -d $(PROJECT) -p $(dir $@) $(PYFILES)


cheers,

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Code review....   
   
1.  
You have a few lines like :  
s = '%s' % ' '.join(newlines)  
Surely that is the same as just:  
s = ' '.join(newlines)  
  
2.  
You use the single line option value as part of the key in __messages  
dictionary. That means that the output will have duplicate msgid values  
if your source contains both _normal('hello world') and _single('hello 
world'). Other GNU gettext tools assume that there will not be 
duplicates.  
 
(assuming --keyword=_normal --keyword-single=_single) 
  
3.  
You also get duplicates for:  
  
_single("""this is one line  
and this is another""")  
  
and  
  
_single("""this is one line and  
this is another""")  
  
because normalization is performed just before output. Unless Im  
missing something, I think the right solution to these two problems is  
to normalize before calling __addentry, and leave the key to   
__messages as it was originally.  
  
  
  

Is this change still useful for 2.6?

A rare example of a 5-year old patch that still applies with only a minor tweak.  This is probably a sign that pygettext itself has not been kept up to date.   In any case, I am attaching an updated patch which I did not test beyond running pygettext.py -h.  There was no response from OP to the patch review and from a brief look at the patch, it is not commit ready.

I am adding this as a dependency to meta-issue #7962 so that the fate of this patch and pygettext itself can be decided.

My gut reaction is that pygettext should be deprecated, other opinions are welcome.