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Structured strings

Structured strings

A structured string is a feature that breaks a string into parts. The structured string rule decides how the breaking is done. Soluling uses regular expressions in breaking the rules. The reason to use structured strings is that in some cases, the string format must be specific. For example, it must contain specific characters that are not part of the meaningful string. If the string is shown on the translation sheet as it is, it is possible that the translator will enter the string in an invalid format. To prevent that, you can split combined strings into the plain part using expressions

Let's have an example. We might have a structured string line this:

Car;Bike;Airplane

As you can see, the string contains three substrings separated by a semicolon. Normally the string would be extracted as a whole. This makes it difficult to translate because the translator might break the format. If we specify a structure expression to be used when scanning the data, Soluling can break the original string into three substrings. The structure expression marks substring as # character. You separated # characters with regular expression. If we specify take an #;#;# as an expression for the above string, Soluling will extract three strings:

Car
Bike
Airplane

Each string gets into its own row and is translated independently.

Samples

The following table show some expression examples:

Structure rule Sample string Strings that are extracted
#;#;# Car;Bike;Airplace Car
Bike
Airplane
"#" "This is a sample" This is a sample
^([^\t]+)\t([^\t]+)\t#\t([^\t]*)\t site<tab>25<tab>Site<tab>F<tab> Site