How to Validate & Fix a Broken PO File Online (Free Tool)
A triage manual for a catalog that is already broken, built on a demonstration: a file missing one quotation mark does not fail to parse — it parses into the wrong thing. The key Hello silently becomes Hell, the entry after it can vanish entirely, the result compiles to a valid MO, and the string falls back to English forever with no error at any stage. So "does it open" is the wrong question. Sorts every breakage into three tiers by who complains: tier 1 will not parse and must be fixed in a text editor before any web tool can display it; tier 2 parses but is structurally wrong, which is why one tool accepts a file another rejects; tier 3 parses cleanly, compiles cleanly and is still wrong, which is where placeholder mismatches, plural arity, duplicates, fuzzy entries and a leftover CHARSET header live. Includes a sixty-second triage sequence, the repair for each break, an honest split of which fixes belong in a browser and which do not, why loading a file in any editor is not validation, the one command that actually decides, a CI loop to run it on every commit, and a symptom-to-tier-to-fix table.