Variables in translation items

tydel just wrote me saying:

I had one question ... You say not to break up sentences, but sometimes it's not possible because there's a perl variable in the middle of a sentence, and that can't be stuck into the language file. Is that alright? You'll see what I mean in the files I'm sending if I didn't explain it clear enough.

And his file contained:

/friends/add.bml.success.text1=User

/friends/add.bml.success.text2=was added to your friend list. You can view your friends page

/friends/add.bml.success.text3=here

That's bad. Not only does it completely kill the context for the translator, but it forces the translator into a word order that's almost certainly impossible or just plain wrong in their language.

I forgot to explain variables.

What you want is:

/friends/add.bml.success.text=User (=LJUSER [[username]] LJUSER=) was added to your friend list. You can view your friends page <a href="[[url]]">here</a>.

(okay, so I added the BML tag around username, but you get my drift)

Anyway, in the BML file then:

$ret .= BML::ml("/friends/add.bml.success.text", { 'username' => $username, 'url' => $some_url });

Cool?

The complete item name is (currently) required when using BML::ml (as opposed to the shortcut you can use with the _ML tags), but I might change that. For now, though, use the long form.