diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'docs')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/topics/i18n.txt | 21 |
1 files changed, 20 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/docs/topics/i18n.txt b/docs/topics/i18n.txt index 3e8234b342..af2af86cd7 100644 --- a/docs/topics/i18n.txt +++ b/docs/topics/i18n.txt @@ -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:: |