---

15.5.21.4 What are Strings And Quote-like Expressions?

Perl offers a plethora of different string constructs. Those that can be used either as arguments to functions or inside braces for hash lookups are generally supported by xgettext.

• double-quoted strings
  

  print gettext "Hello World!";
  

• single-quoted strings
  

  print gettext 'Hello World!';
  

• the operator qq
  

  print gettext qq |Hello World!|;
  print gettext qq <E-mail: <guido\@imperia.net>>;
  

  The operator qq is fully supported. You can use arbitrary delimiters, including the four bracketing delimiters (round, angle, square, curly) that nest.

• the operator q
  

  print gettext q |Hello World!|;
  print gettext q <E-mail: <guido@imperia.net>>;
  

  The operator q is fully supported. You can use arbitrary delimiters, including the four bracketing delimiters (round, angle, square, curly) that nest.

• the operator qx
  

  print gettext qx ;LANGUAGE=C /bin/date;
  print gettext qx [/usr/bin/ls | grep '^[A-Z]*'];
  

  The operator qx is fully supported. You can use arbitrary delimiters, including the four bracketing delimiters (round, angle, square, curly) that nest.

  The example is actually a useless use of gettext. It will invoke the gettext function on the output of the command specified with the qx operator. The feature was included in order to make the interface consistent (the parser will extract all strings and quote-like expressions).

• here documents
  

  print gettext <<'EOF';
  program not found in $PATH
  EOF
  
  print ngettext <<EOF, <<"EOF";
  one file deleted
  EOF
  several files deleted
  EOF
  

  Here-documents are recognized. If the delimiter is enclosed in single quotes, the string is not interpolated. If it is enclosed in double quotes or has no quotes at all, the string is interpolated.

  Delimiters that start with a digit are not supported!