Opening PO Files

The PO file type is primarily associated with PHP.

PO	File extension: PO
	File type:	portable object

What is a PO file?

PO files mostly belong to PHP by PHP Group. A PO file is a portable object created with the gettext localization and internationalization tool in various programming environments. A portable object contains translation data which is used to add multilingual support to an application or a package. This is usually achieved through the msginit utility in a gettext implementation. For example, to generate a French portable object for from a portable object template, a developer has to run the command msginit --locale=fr --input=template_name.pot. Multilingual data for PHP applications hosted on WordPress are saved in PO files which are often generated by the Gettext package for PHP.

How to open a PO file

You need a suitable software like PHP to open a PO file. Without proper software you will receive a Windows message "How do you want to open this file?" or "Windows cannot open this file" or a similar Mac/iPhone/Android alert. If you cannot open your PO file correctly, try to right-click or long-press the file. Then click "Open with" and choose an application. You can also display a PO file directly in the browser:. Just drag the file onto this browser window and drop it.

Online PO Text Viewer

Choose your .po file to view

or drag and drop it here

Online File Viewer

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How to extract texts from PO files or capture a screenshot to PDF, JPG, DOCX, TXT, ...

1. To do so, click the "Choose your .po file to view" button above.
2. After your file is opened in browser,
3. click "Save as..." in the menu.
4. Then choose the file format (e.g. JPG, PDF, DOCX, TXT, ...) you want.
5. Your file will be converted and downloaded.

PO file format:

To find out what program is needed to open PO files, you need to determine the file format. The initial characters of a file are called signature, sometimes also referred to as "magic bytes". The signature can be used to infer the file format. If the file extension does not match the file format, double-clicking on the file will cause an error upon opening. If there are problems opening a file, you must first determine the file format used. Our analysis of the PO files produces the following result:

PO is a very commonly used file extension and primarily uses a special format that can be read by various programs. The two most popular formats are as follows:

• 90% of all PO files are associated with Gettext Portable Object. The content consists of readable text data, which can be read using a text editor. Most of these files are 3 KB to 510 KB in size. It is a modern file type. The files contain the following words: msgid "", msgstr "", POT-Creation-Date, This file, translations, #, fuzzy, "Project-Id-Version: PROJECT VERSION\n", survey, "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: EMAIL@ADDRESS\n", package and Copyright. Files like these are sometimes connected to translation, woocommerce, django, messages, learndash, admin, survey, strings and texts.
• 6% of all PO files store the data in the UTF-8 file format. UTF-8 is the World Wide Web's most common character encoding for Unicode. UTF-8 files can be viewed with any text editor. These files start with the 3 bytes  (hex: EF BB BF), the so called byte order mark (BOM). The contents of these files can even be read by a human. Most of these files are 11 KB to 840 KB in size. The following keywords are characteristic: msgid "", msgstr "", POT-Creation-Date, translation, PO-Revision-Date, "Project-Id-Version: Game\n", # Copyright Epic Games, Inc. All Rights Reserved and English. Game.po is a typical file name. Such files are related to splitgate, dreadout and tutorial.

All other PO files (4%) have no uniform format, the following 5 formats exist: Apple II ProDOS Order disk image and msgid. They are often associated with builder, events, product, management, page, spanish, wpml or yith. If you want to find out what your PO file contains, drag and drop it onto this page.