Sorry for late response, I was traveling. I'll have a look this afternoon.

@arashm it's still WIP - the specs are passing but when I try it in my project, it's not working as expected. Multiline comments are being output incorrectly by to_s (only the first line starts with a # with subsequent lines omitting the #).

Trying to get my head around it, but I think fundamentally the way to_h exports the Po object wrt to plural and multiline msgstr elements may be ambiguous.

I'm hoping to go back to it tomorrow or early next week, I'll try to reproduce that scenario in a spec.

@arashm this should we resolved now. Let me know if you spot any issues

@arashm sorry to bug you again. Did you get a chance to look at this. I'd love to just bump the version I have rather than point our app at my fork.

I've changed Entry so that it accepts plural form msgstr entries as msgstr_n instance variable and writer methods, but exports these (via to_h) using original msgstr[n] notations.

@rod-murphy could you elaborate why this is necessary? That looks like an unnecessary hack to me.

To add to my previous question. Using this test file:

# small test po 1
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"


msgid "Test"
msgstr "Test"

msgid ""
"Hello\n"
"there!\n"
msgstr ""
"Yay!\n"
"i like"

msgid "car"
msgid_plural "cars"
msgstr[0] "singular"
msgstr[1] "plural"

Parsing it and using po.entries[2].msgstr[1] returns plural as expected. Why does that not work for you?

Thanks for the reply @dfherr.

could you elaborate why this is necessary? That looks like an unnecessary hack to me.

As I said above, it's to address the issue where the array produced by Entry#to_h cannot be used to as an input to Entry.add when it came to multi-line messages.

In my mind, if I can export an Po object as and array of hashes and must import entries by passing a hash (or array of hashes), then this should be reversible?

You can see this when you run entry_spec.rb in this PR against lib/poparser/entry.rb in master:

1) PoParser::Entry should show a hash presentation of a plural string entry
     Failure/Error: expect(@entry.to_h).to eq(result)
     
       expected: {:msgid_plural=>"right word", :"msgstr[0]"=>["mot", "juste"], :"msgstr[1]"=>["mots", "justes"], :translator_comment=>["comment", "second line of comments"]}
            got: {:msgid_plural=>"right word", :msgstr_0=>"motjuste", :msgstr_1=>"motsjustes", :translator_comment=>"comment\nsecond line of comments"}
     
       (compared using ==)
     
       Diff:
       
       @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
       -:"msgstr[0]" => ["mot", "juste"],
       -:"msgstr[1]" => ["mots", "justes"],
        :msgid_plural => "right word",
       -:translator_comment => ["comment", "second line of comments"],
       +:msgstr_0 => "motjuste",
       +:msgstr_1 => "motsjustes",
       +:translator_comment => "comment\nsecond line of comments",
       
     # ./spec/poparser/entry_spec.rb:51:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

  2) PoParser::Entry should show a hash presentation of an entry
     Failure/Error: expect(@entry.to_h).to eq(result)
     
       expected: {:msgid=>"string", :msgstr=>"reshte", :translator_comment=>["comment", "second line of comments"]}
            got: {:msgid=>"string", :msgstr=>"reshte", :translator_comment=>"comment\nsecond line of comments"}
     
       (compared using ==)
     
       Diff:
       @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
        :msgid => "string",
        :msgstr => "reshte",
       -:translator_comment => ["comment", "second line of comments"],
       +:translator_comment => "comment\nsecond line of comments",
       
     # ./spec/poparser/entry_spec.rb:35:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

The resulting hashes are not correctly added to a Po object when PoParser::Po.add is called

@rod-murphy that doesn't really clear up why msgstr_0 and msgstr_1 syntax is necessary? What's wrong with msgstr as an array and accessing with indicies? It seems to me I'm missing a piece of the puzzle to understand why you are adding these, because entry.msgstr properly returns an array and entry.msgstr_0 is a NoMethodError on master (as it should be).

I agree that it makes sense that these are reversible, but why adding another syntax to accessing plural msgstr?

I was checking your original issue #27, and as I remember the issue was not being able to parse the header, because the Header expects an array but to_h returns it as a string. I was checking and it seems adding following code to the beginning of Header#convert_msgstr_to_hash(msgstr) would solve your issue:

    def convert_msgstr_to_hash(msgstr)
      value = msgstr.value.is_a?(String) ? msgstr.value.split("\\n") : msgstr.value

      options_array = value.map do |options|
      ...

Wouldn't this be sufficient for your case?

@rod-murphy that doesn't really clear up why msgstr_0 and msgstr_1 syntax is necessary? What's wrong with msgstr as an array and accessing with indicies? It seems to me I'm missing a piece of the puzzle to understand why you are adding these, because entry.msgstr properly returns an array and entry.msgstr_0 is a NoMethodError on master (as it should be).

The reason this is necessary is because of how writer methods are defined. i.e. it's not possible to have a method named msgstr[0] etc. in the Entry class. We could drop these writer methods and make the code a little simpler.

To better cover all case and make is a little clearer, I've updated the Entry spec to make things a bit clearer with the following test:

  it 'should show a hash representation of a complex entry' do
    # Ensure the to_h method is reversible
    # From SimplePoParser::Parser - https://github.com/experteer/simple_po_parser/blob/v1.1.5/spec/simple_po_parser/parser_spec.rb#L31
    entry_hash = {
      :translator_comment => ["translator-comment", ""],
      :extracted_comment => "extract",
      :reference => ["reference1", "reference2"],
      :flag => "flag",
      :previous_msgctxt => "previous context",
      :previous_msgid => ["", "multiline\\n", "previous messageid"],
      :previous_msgid_plural => "previous msgid_plural",
      :msgctxt => "Context",
      :msgid => "msgid",
      :msgid_plural => ["", "multiline msgid_plural\\n", ""],
      "msgstr[0]" => "msgstr 0",
      "msgstr[1]" => ["", "msgstr 1 multiline 1\\n", "msgstr 1 line 2\\n"],
      "msgstr[2]" => "msgstr 2"
    }

    entry = PoParser::Entry.new(entry_hash)
    expect(entry.to_h).to eq(entry_hash)
  end

Essentially, for Entry#to_h (and thus Po#to_h) to be reversible, it needs to output the same format that SimplePoParser::Parser outputs as this is what gets used when the Po file/string is parsed

@arashm your solution doesn't go far enough. If you run the above spec, you can see that in addition to header entries, strings and multiline forms of msgstr[n] are not exported correctly.

Sorry again for the delay, I will hopefully look into it today after work.

Your suggestion seems to change the behavior of to_h, hence breaking the public API. I suggest we do something like this. Can you have a look and let me know what do you think?

Thanks @arashm and again sorry for the delay coming back to you.

Generally your fix will work for the most part (I've added a few comments to your commit), however, when run against's the test hash from SimplePoParser::Parser specs (in my comment above), it's not reversible when it comes to some of the comment fields.

Can you help me understand where I'm changing the behaviour of to_h there are no specs or docs to suggest my suggestion will break things for other users? I agree that I'm suggesting a change to the public API in terms of the assessor methods for plural message strings as we can't otherwise distinguish between multi-line and plural message strings using a msgstr= method.

It's kinda weird that every message in this topic start with an excuse for the delay on responses, but anyway, I'm sorry 😅 I (again) totally forgot about this for a while.

Can you help me understand where I'm changing the behaviour of to_h there are no specs or docs to suggest my suggestion will break things for other users?

The behaviour change is exactly about your comment here. The current version of to_h is returning multiline msgstr in as a string, but you now have changed it to return an array. In the current version if I do something like this:

[1] pry(main)> load 'lib/poparser.rb'
=> true
[2] pry(main)> po = PoParser.parse_file('test/complex_entry.po')
=> <PoParser::Po, Translated: 1(100.0%) Untranslated: 0(0.0%) Fuzzy: 0(0.0%)>
[3] pry(main)> po.to_h
=> [{:translator_comment=>"translator-comment\n",
  :extracted_comment=>"extract",
  :reference=>"reference1\nreference2",
  :flag=>"flag",
  :previous_msgctxt=>"previous context",
  :previous_msgid=>"multiline\\nprevious messageid",
  :previous_msgid_plural=>"previous msgid_plural",
  :msgctxt=>"Context",
  :msgid=>"msgid",
  :msgid_plural=>"multiline msgid_plural\\n",
  "msgstr[0]"=>"msgstr 0",
  "msgstr[1]"=>"msgstr 1 multiline 1\\nmsgstr 1 line 2\\n",
  "msgstr[2]"=>"msgstr 2"}]

You can see msgstr[1] is returning a string with line breaks. That's what I'm trying to preserve, since it's been like this, some people may have their code written to expect a string there. Maybe a bad decision since the beginning but we gonna need a major breaking release if we want to change that to an array.