Trying to open a non-existant .po file gives incorrect error

[boxed]

                raise IOError('Syntax error in po file %s(line %s)' %
                              (fpath, self.current_line))

but in fact the file doesn't exist.

[kthy]

The problem here is that polib can both parse a string directly, or read a file and parse its contents. If the input is not an existing file (polib.py line 1266), it assumes that input is a string and tries to parse it, hence the error message you're seeing.

"Fixing" the error message would mean guessing that the input looks path-like and giving the user feedback to that effect.

[boxed]

Hmm.. well that's unfortunate. I guess the real fix is to have different arguments for path and for a string. But the error message could at least say "The file does not exist, or there's a syntax error" or something. It's not great, but it's at least not a lie.

[rillig]

@kthy What about assuming that if the string contains a line break, it is meant as direct text, and in all other cases it's a filepath? This simple rule would get the error message from "always wrong" to "wrong in probably less than 1/10000 cases".

I don't think there are practical use cases where a file is named msgid "".po.