Get cryptic error `Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'message')` for a simple problem

[Sinc63]

Reporting a bug?

I am updating i18n translations for our project. After running 17 translations for French I started getting an error from the i18n plugin, with none of the stack trace leading back to my code line, just the file name.

Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'message')
5:56:50 PM [vite] Internal server error: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'message')
  Plugin: vite-plugin-vue-i18n
  File: /var/src/project/src/i18n/fr.json
      at newOptions.onError (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/bundle-utils/lib/codegen.js:102:48)
      at newOptions.onError (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/bundle-utils/lib/codegen.js:102:36)
      at newOptions.onError (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/bundle-utils/lib/codegen.js:102:36)
      at emitError (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/message-compiler/dist/message-compiler.cjs.js:197:13)
      at readTokenInPlaceholder (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/message-compiler/dist/message-compiler.cjs.js:681:21)
      at readToken (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/message-compiler/dist/message-compiler.cjs.js:776:20)
      at Object.nextToken (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/message-compiler/dist/message-compiler.cjs.js:823:16)
      at parseNamed (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/message-compiler/dist/message-compiler.cjs.js:910:19)
      at parseMessage (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/message-compiler/dist/message-compiler.cjs.js:1048:37)
      at parseResource (/var/src/project/node_modules/@intlify/message-compiler/dist/message-compiler.cjs.js:1096:25)

The simple problem is that other tools got an invalid translation back. I use I18NAlly to fetch translations (I think from Google), and in this one case:
"from-users-usernames": "from users {usernames}",
became
"from-users-usernames": "des utilisateurs {nom d'utilisateurs}",

It would be very helpful, given that I've seen Google translate parameter names in other cases, if intlify would explicitly detect problems that it can't handle in the parameter name (whether that's the space or the apostrophe or both), and report an explicit error, something like invalid parameter name in translation string "from-users-usernames" in /var/src/project/src/i18n/fr.json:1282. Note that I gave both the tag and the line number, but either would likely be sufficient.

Expected behavior

If a parameter name isn't acceptable an explicit warning should be given, specifying at the very least that a specific string or line number has a problem with the parameter name. Specifying the limitations of the parameter names in the error might be help, if not too cumbersome,. A link to docs might be sufficient. (And note that it's not the case that I expect the tool to support a two word parameter name, I just need it to explicitly detect the problem since the translators sometimes do that to us.)

Reproduction

See my sample and insert it in your favourite app to test.

Issue Package

vite-plugin-vue-i18n

System Info

Need to install the following packages:
  envinfo@7.13.0

"@intlify/vite-plugin-vue-i18n@^3.3.1":
"@intlify/message-compiler@9.2.2",
vue-i18n@^9.2.0-beta.35:

Screenshot

No response

Additional context

No response

Validations

• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the README
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion.

[Sinc63]

I did some additional translations and my Spanish translations mutilated a @lower:message.message-s reference by translating the lower key. This caused a very similar error in the Intlify code, but this time from readTokenInLinked instead of readTokenInPlaceholder. Please apply the same fix in both.

[Sinc63]

I have another instance of the same issue. Same error message, same stack trace, but different cause because I fixed a couple of incorrect interpolation names.

Could you please do something to pass the error code and line number through to the error handler?

The cause (found by a painful binary search in 2000+ lines) was this line:
"count-only": "nie | | {count}",
Your parser is smart enough not to like the missing alternative, but not smart enough to actually say so. I also find it a little strange that the stack traces for my two problems are identical, though one is a problem with braces and the other a problem with missing components to an alternation.