babel-plugin-formatjs

What is babel-plugin-formatjs?

babel-plugin-formatjs is a Babel plugin that transforms message descriptors for the FormatJS library, which is used for internationalization (i18n) in JavaScript applications. It helps in extracting, compiling, and optimizing messages for different locales.

What are babel-plugin-formatjs's main functionalities?

Message Extraction

This feature allows you to extract message descriptors from your code. The extracted messages can then be used to generate translation files for different locales.

/* Babel configuration file (babel.config.js) */
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    [
      'babel-plugin-formatjs',
      {
        idInterpolationPattern: '[sha512:contenthash:base64:6]',
        extractFromFormatMessageCall: true,
        ast: true
      }
    ]
  ]
};

Message Compilation

This feature allows you to compile message descriptors into a format that can be used at runtime. This is useful for optimizing the performance of your application by pre-compiling messages.

/* Example of compiling messages */
import { compile } from 'babel-plugin-formatjs';

const messages = {
  'greeting': 'Hello, {name}!'
};

const compiledMessages = compile(messages);
console.log(compiledMessages);

Optimizing Messages

This feature allows you to optimize message descriptors for better performance. This can include removing unnecessary whitespace, minifying the messages, and other optimizations.

/* Example of optimizing messages */
import { optimize } from 'babel-plugin-formatjs';

const messages = {
  'greeting': 'Hello, {name}!'
};

const optimizedMessages = optimize(messages);
console.log(optimizedMessages);

Other packages similar to babel-plugin-formatjs

react-intl

react-intl is a part of the FormatJS suite and provides React components and an API to format dates, numbers, and strings, including pluralization and handling translations. It is more focused on providing React-specific components and hooks for internationalization, whereas babel-plugin-formatjs is more about transforming and optimizing message descriptors at the build time.

i18next

i18next is a popular internationalization framework for JavaScript that provides a complete solution for localizing your app. It supports various plugins for different frameworks and libraries. Compared to babel-plugin-formatjs, i18next offers a more comprehensive set of features for runtime localization, including language detection, interpolation, and pluralization.

README

babel-plugin-formatjs

We've migrated the docs to https://formatjs.io/docs/tooling/babel-plugin/.