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Placeholders

Terminology

New to placeholders? See the Glossary: ../glossary.md#placeholder

Placeholders are special tokens embedded in strings that are replaced at runtime with dynamic values (numbers, names, etc.). RimLoc understands two common families:

  • Brace style: {...}
  • Examples: {0}, {count}, {PAWN_label}, {weapon}
  • Percent style: %...
  • Examples: %s, %d, %i, %f, positional forms like %1$s, width like %02d

RimLoc treats placeholders as opaque tokens: it checks presence and basic shape, not the semantic type. Your translation must keep the same placeholders as the source.

Rules and Recommendations

  • Do not drop, rename, or alter placeholders between source and translation.
  • Keep brace pairs balanced and non‑empty: {} is invalid; { name } → { name } is fine (spaces allowed).
  • Percent tokens must be valid: %% is treated as a literal percent, not a placeholder.
  • Order is generally tolerated, but mismatched sets are flagged.

How RimLoc validates

  • rimloc-cli validate --root <MOD>
  • Emits a placeholder-check category when placeholders exist.
  • Warns on malformed tokens (unbalanced {}, empty/invalid names, suspicious % tokens).
  • rimloc-cli validate-po --po <FILE>
  • Compares placeholders in msgid vs msgstr. Any difference is reported as a mismatch.
  • Use --strict to make mismatches fail CI (exit code 1).

See also: ../cli/validate_po.md

Typical pitfalls

  • Dropping a placeholder entirely: the translated string must still contain all tokens.
  • Mismatched braces {name or {}.
  • Typos in percent tokens: %z, % 2d are invalid.
  • Mixing literal braces with placeholders: escape appropriately in the source application; in RimWorld XML, literal braces rarely appear.

Quick checks

# Validate XML placeholders in a mod (human readable)
rimloc-cli --quiet validate --root ./Mods/MyMod --format text

# Validate PO placeholders strictly (machine readable)
rimloc-cli --quiet validate-po --po ./out/mymod.po --strict --format json | jq .