Using gettext for arbitrary file format

[Jean-Marc Lasgouttes]

Hello,

We use gettext in the lyx project (www.lyx.org) not only to
translate C++ source strings, but also some strings that we have in
our data files (and also Qt ui files). Currently, we have an ugly sed
script which creates a dummy extl10n.h files and run xgettext on that.
This is however not very convenient.

Is there some way in xgettext to handle arbitrary formats? I would
think that it could be possible to describe by a regexp (like we do in
our ugly sed scripts) the syntax (usually simple) that we want to
capture.

The big advantage of this approach is that it would give us proper
comments above entries showing where the string occured.

Any help appreciated.

JMarc