pockingbird 0.1.0

Report-only CLI that finds duplicate translation keys across gettext .po catalogs
Documentation

pockingbird

CI License: MIT

A CLI that finds duplicate translation keys in gettext .po catalogs.

Over time a catalog grows keys whose translations are identical across every locale — real duplicates that can collapse into one key — plus near-duplicates that differ only by trailing punctuation, a typo, or one disagreeing locale. pockingbird surfaces all of them in a single report.

It is report-only: it never edits your .po files. The decision to collapse keys stays with you.

How it works

  1. Discover every .po file under the target path.
  2. Parse each locale into a matrix key × locale → translation.
  3. Group keys with matching translation signatures, ranked by how many locales agree.

A key's translation vector is its signature; two keys match when their vectors agree. Matching runs at three tiers:

  • exact — byte-equal after trimming.
  • normalized — equal after case-folding, whitespace collapsing, and trailing punctuation stripping (Ok vs OK.).
  • fuzzy ≤2 — within Levenshtein distance 2 (typos, stray punctuation). Per locale, near strings are clustered (BK-tree + union-find) and compared by cluster.

Within each tier, groups are reported by agreement level — full M/M first, then M−1/M, M−2/M, … down to a configurable floor (min_locales_agree). Empty cells and whole incomplete locales are handled via config.

Install

cargo install --path .

Usage

pockingbird find .                              # current dir, text report
pockingbird find ./locales --format json        # JSON for pipelines
pockingbird find . --config pockingbird.toml    # with a config file
  • text (default) — colored sections per tier, each grouped by level. Every group lists its keys, shared translations, and diverging locales; cross-domain groups get a "unify into a shared domain" hint.
  • json — the same structure as machine-readable data.

Exit code is always 0 — it reports, it does not gate.

Configuration (pockingbird.toml)

[scan]
po_patterns = ["**/*.po"]
ignore_dirs = ["vendor", "node_modules", ".git"]
roots = ["."]

[locales]
exclude = []             # e.g. ["ch_CH"] to drop an incomplete locale

[match]
tiers = ["exact", "normalized", "fuzzy"]  # which tiers to compute
fuzzy_max_distance = 2
fuzzy_min_length = 5      # shorter strings skip the fuzzy tier
empty_policy = "own"      # "own": empty is a value | "skip": ignore that cell
min_locales_agree = 5     # report from M/M down to this floor

[match.normalize]
case_fold = true
collapse_whitespace = true
strip_trailing_punct = true

[output]
format = "text"           # "text" | "json"

Domain terms are defined in CONTEXT.md. Example catalogs live in fixtures/; an end-to-end test in tests/integration.rs.