xgettext & multiline string literals

First of all hello to this list! I am searching for this quite some time, but still could not find any answer. I use gettext in my C programs with no problems some time now. So I decided to do the same with my web projects. It was a nearly painless start, with only one exception. I am not able to use multiline string literals for slightly longer texts in PHP. In C i can use the following: _("This is just a slightly longer " "text for demontration purpose"); To split one long string into (what i called) a multiline string literal. This works perfectly, at least with gcc and xgettext does extract the whole string (both lines) as a key. In PHP this is not possible at all because it simply does not allow this syntactically. So i tried the following in PHP: _("This is just a slightly longer " . "text for demontration purpose"); But that is not understood by xgettext. The .po file does only contain the first row of the string as a key. Has anyone any solution for this? Best regards Georg Steffers