Poexam

Poexam is a blazingly fast PO file linter with a comprehensive diagnostic report.

It reports very few false positives and can be used in CI jobs and pre-commit hooks.

[!NOTE] Poexam is in active development and may not be fully stable yet.
The command-line interface and features may change at any time.
As it doesn't write anything on disk, there should be no risk of data loss, and bug reports are welcome.

Overview

• ⚡️ Blazingly fast: large directories and files are checked in parallel, in a few milliseconds.
• 🔎 Rules: a lot of checks performed with very few false positives.
• 🎯 Clear results: tricky errors in strings are highlighted with colors.
• 📊 Statistics: detailed statistics including progress, count of messages/words/characters.
• 💻 Multi-platform: available wherever the Rust compiler is available.
• 🎁 Free software: released under GPLv3.

Installation

With cargo:

cargo install poexam

Pre-commit

Add this to your .pre-commit-config.yaml:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/poexam/poexam
    rev: <git-tag-or-commit-sha>  # Use a specific tag vX.Y.Z or commit SHA
    hooks:
      - id: poexam

Features

Poexam can check entire directories and a lot of PO files in just a few milliseconds.

Rules

It can perform a lot of checks via the default rules:

Some extra rules are not used by default because they are not really "checks", report too many false positives or can slow down the process.

You can enable them on-demand:

The result is very clear, almost all errors are highlighted in the strings so you can immediately see where the issue is.

You can check by yourself with the following command executed in the root directory of the project (output is truncated here):

$ poexam check --select all examples/fr.po
examples/fr.po:25: [warning:blank] blank translation
        |
     25 | Test: blank translation
        |
     26 |
        |

examples/fr.po:29: [info:brackets] missing opening and closing square brackets '[' (1 / 0) and ']' (1 / 0)
        |
     29 | Test [brackets]
        |
     30 | Test crochets
        |

examples/fr.po:34: [error:c-formats] inconsistent C format strings
        |
     34 | Name: %s, age: %d
        |
     35 | Âge : %2$d, nom : %1$f
        |

examples/fr.po:38: [info:double-quotes] missing double quotes (2 / 0)
        |
     38 | Test "double quotes"
        |
     39 | Test guillemets doubles
        |

(...)

1 files checked: 24 problems in 1 files (5 errors, 1 warnings, 18 info) [23.890354ms]

Spell checking

You can check all words in a file by using one of these rules:

• spelling-ctxt: check all words in context strings (msgctxt) with English en_US dictionary.
• spelling-msgid: check all words in source strings (msgid) with English en_US dictionary.
• spelling-msgstr: check all words in translated strings (msgstr) with the language found in PO file header.

The special rule spelling can be used to select these 3 rules at once.

For rules spelling-ctxt and spelling-msgid, the default dictionary used is en_US and can be changed with the option --lang-id.

The dictionaries are read from the hunspell directory (option --path-dicts to override it), in the following way:

• Search the dictionary with the language name, e.g. files en_US.aff and en_US.dic
• Search the dictionary with the language code and no country, e.g. files en.aff and en.dic.

Personal words can be used, so that they are ignored by the spell checker (always considered good).
With the option --path-words you can specify a directory containing personal words files, one per language.

For example this file en_US.dic can be used in such directory to ignore some words in English:

charset
hostname
stdout
uptime

The output misspelled displays all misspelled words and can be used to build such dictionary.

For example, to build a dictionary for English (the English hunspell dictionary must be installed):

poexam check --select spelling-id --output misspelled fr.po > en_US.dic

And for the translated words in French (the French hunspell dictionary must be installed):

poexam check --select spelling-str --output misspelled fr.po > fr.dic

Statistics

Poexam can also give statistics about the translation progress and number of lines/words/charecters, see: poexam help stats.

Example:

$ poexam stats --sort status
po/de.po    [████████████████████] 3853 = 3853 (100%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%)
po/fr.po    [████████████████████] 3853 = 3853 (100%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%)
po/pl.po    [████████████████████] 3853 = 3853 (100%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%)
po/sr.po    [████████████████████] 3853 = 3853 (100%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%) + 0 (0%)
po/tr.po    [█████████████▒▒     ] 3853 = 2519 (65%) + 480 (12%) + 854 (22%) + 0 (0%)
po/ja.po    [█████████▒▒▒▒       ] 3853 = 1846 (47%) + 836 (21%) + 1171 (30%) + 0 (0%)
po/pt.po    [████████▒▒▒▒▒       ] 3853 = 1586 (41%) + 1002 (26%) + 1265 (32%) + 0 (0%)
po/es.po    [██████▒▒▒▒▒         ] 3853 = 1259 (32%) + 1113 (28%) + 1481 (38%) + 0 (0%)
po/it.po    [██████▒▒▒▒▒▒        ] 3853 = 1226 (31%) + 1183 (30%) + 1444 (37%) + 0 (0%)
po/cs.po    [██████▒▒▒▒▒▒        ] 3853 = 1178 (30%) + 1240 (32%) + 1435 (37%) + 0 (0%)
po/pt_BR.po [████▒▒▒▒▒▒          ] 3853 = 853 (22%) + 1163 (30%) + 1837 (47%) + 0 (0%)
po/ru.po    [▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒           ] 3853 = 96 (2%) + 1782 (46%) + 1975 (51%) + 0 (0%)
po/hu.po    [▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒           ] 3853 = 76 (1%) + 1766 (45%) + 2011 (52%) + 0 (0%)
Total (13)  [██████████▒▒▒▒      ] 50089 = 26051 (52%) + 10565 (21%) + 13473 (26%) + 0 (0%)

Detailed statistics on words and characters:

$ poexam stats --words fr.po ja.po
fr.po:
                    Entries          Words (src / translated)     Chars (src / translated)
Translated           3853 (100%)      40634 (100%)      48504     184916 (100%)     226692
Fuzzy                   0 (  0%)          0 (  0%)          0          0 (  0%)          0
Untranslated            0 (  0%)          0 (  0%)          0          0 (  0%)          0
Obsolete                0 (  0%)          0 (  0%)          0          0 (  0%)          0
Total                3853             40634             48504     184916            226692

ja.po:
                    Entries          Words (src / translated)     Chars (src / translated)
Translated           1846 ( 47%)      16879 ( 41%)       7671      74349 ( 40%)      50055
Fuzzy                 836 ( 21%)       9763 ( 24%)       4787      45188 ( 24%)      29197
Untranslated         1171 ( 30%)      13992 ( 34%)          0      65379 ( 35%)          0
Obsolete                0 (  0%)          0 (  0%)          0          0 (  0%)          0
Total                3853             40634              7671     184916             50055

Total (2):
                    Entries          Words (src / translated)     Chars (src / translated)
Translated           5699 ( 73%)      57513 ( 70%)      56175     259265 ( 70%)     276747
Fuzzy                 836 ( 10%)       9763 ( 12%)       4787      45188 ( 12%)      29197
Untranslated         1171 ( 15%)      13992 ( 17%)          0      65379 ( 17%)          0
Obsolete                0 (  0%)          0 (  0%)          0          0 (  0%)          0
Total                7706             81268             56175     369832            276747

Roadmap

• Add new rules.
• Add support for custom rules and checks.
• Add a server mode to integrate with IDEs and text editors.

Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Sébastien Helleu

This file is part of Poexam, the blazingly fast PO file linter.

Poexam is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Poexam is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Poexam. If not, see https://gnu.org/licenses/.