[mb-i18n] Strings varying only by period or colon

[Ian McEwen]

See http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/MBS-4822 -- I'm wondering how it'll work in all your various languages-of-choice to either:

a.) just plain move the . or : out of the string, and have it hardcoded
b.) have an extra string for e.g. "{item}." and "{item}:"

Or, put differently: are there any cases where you'll want to vary this sort of terminating punctuation (differently than it's done on the english site) based on the content of {item}?

I'd guess probably not, but there's often strange language-specific things I don't know about, so I like to ask.

--
Ian McEwen <ianmcorvidae at ianmcorvidae.net> <ihm08 at hampshire.edu>
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[Alexander Dupuy]

Post by Ian McEwen
a.) just plain move the . or : out of the string, and have it hardcoded
b.) have an extra string for e.g. "{item}." and "{item}:"

In Western languages, there are a few cases where the use of punctuation is different; notably in French it is preferred to have a space before and after a colon (http://french.about.com/library/writing/bl-punctuation.htm) but I am not sure that would necessarily be desired in the typical use of colon in MBz.

However, if there are ever any localizations of MBz into non-Western languages, especially those using scripts other than Latin, Cyrillic, or Greek, it is quite likely that different punctuation would be desirable. The Wikipedia article for "Full Stop" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop#Asian_period) lists a number of alternate symbols for period in Asian languages, ideographic full stop (U+3002 http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/3002/index.htm), Arabic full stop (U+06D4 http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/6d4/index.htm), Devanagari danda (U+0964 http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/964/index.htm), and Sinhalese kunddaliya (U+0DF4 http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/df4/index.htm). There are similar variations for other punctuation.

Option B, allowing the punctuation to be localized in a somewhat generic way (i.e. there is one string "{item}." used to localize all cases where an item is followed by a full stop would seem to allow for different languages to choose alternate symbols and/or spacing. The correct punctuation might vary by context (although I can't think of any examples at the moment) but as far as I know, should never vary due to the actual strings preceding the punctuation.

@alex
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mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com