shiny.i18n appears to not handle backslash properly

[fkroener]

I'm using shiny.i18n to create multilang PDFs with knitr and LaTeX.

Using double-backslash for markup in i18n-translated strings results in the key not being recognized anymore.

Example:
i18n$t("One \\& Two")

1: In private$raw_translate(keyword) :
  'One \& Two' translation does not exist.

translate-de.csv:

en,de
"One \\& Two","Eins \\& Zwei"

[dokato]

Indeed, after reading this:

en,de
"One \\& Two","Eins \\& Zwei"

You get:

> i18n$get_translations()
                           de
One \\\\& Two Eins \\\\& Zwei

That's something to do with how read.csv handles backslash and special characters probably.

This worked fine for me though:

en,de
"One & Two","Eins & Zwei"

[fkroener]

Hey @dokato, thanks for the fast reply.

I have no idea what happens. So I need \\ in R to output LaTeX commands, such as \textbf{}. Now with i18n$t("\\textbf{bold face text}") this works. Adding the translation and stripping the second backslash appears to work as well, both to have it matching the key and even for the target language I only need one backslash, which gets correctly entered in the .tex file.

This seems strange to me. But, oh well. If it works I just need to strip the second backslash after extracting the keys.

[dokato]

So I think that you need to keep double backslash only in R strings, otherwise it interprets by default it as a beginning of special character, e.g.

> cat("\ta")
	a
> cat("\\ta")
\ta

I remembered that I had this problem in my other project, where we were porting template to latex (https://github.com/satRdays/badgeR/).

[fkroener]

Alright, I had to use sed to remove the second backslash. But now translations work well enough.

Maybe create_translation_file() could do this for us? ;-)