Commit 452ba4a8 authored by Malcolm Tredinnick's avatar Malcolm Tredinnick
Browse files

Fixed #8768 -- Clarified that ugettext_lazy() results are unicode proxies and 

can't be used as bytestrings.

Still a number of markup changes to be made in this file (and in this
changeset). That's intentional for now, since I'm going to rewrite the file
later this week.


git-svn-id: http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk@9168 bcc190cf-cafb-0310-a4f2-bffc1f526a37
parent fa63f164

docs/topics/i18n.txt

+20 −1
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -174,7 +174,26 @@ For example, to translate a model's ``help_text``, do the following:: 


In this example, ``ugettext_lazy()`` stores a lazy reference to the string --

not the actual translation. The translation itself will be done when the string

is used in a string context, such as template rendering on the Django admin site.

is used in a string context, such as template rendering on the Django admin

site.



The result of a ``ugettext_lazy()`` call can be used wherever you would use a

unicode string (an object with type ``unicode``) in Python. If you try to use

it where a bytestring (a ``str`` object) is expected, things will not work as

expected, since a ``ugettext_lazy()`` object doesn't know how to convert

itself to a bytestring.  You can't use a unicode string inside a bytestring,

either, so this is consistent with normal Python behavior. For example::



    # This is fine: putting a unicode proxy into a unicode string.

    u"Hello %s" % ugettext_lazy("people")



    # This will not work, since you cannot insert a unicode object

    # into a bytestring (nor can you insert our unicode proxy there)

    "Hello %s" % ugettext_lazy("people")



If you ever see output that looks like ``"hello

<django.utils.functional...>"``, you have tried to insert the result of

``ugettext_lazy()`` into a bytestring. That's a bug in your code.



If you don't like the verbose name ``ugettext_lazy``, you can just alias it as

``_`` (underscore), like so::