Mercurial/Python - What Does The Underscore Function Do?

Question

In Mercurial, many of the extensions wrap their help/syntax string in a call to an underscore function, like so:

 _(\'[OPTION] [QUEUE]\')

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Answer 1

Look on line 45:

from mercurial.i18n import _

This is the usual abbreviation in the internationalization package gettext, and possibly other packages too, for the function that returns a translation of its argument to the language the program is currently running in. It's abbreviated to _ for convenience, since it's used for just about every message displayed to the user.

Looks like Mercurial wraps it in their own module. ("i18n" stands for "internationalization" because there are 18 letters in between "i" and "n".)