[SMW-devel] French number formatting (Was: SMW 1.2 Bugs)

[Markus K. <ma...@se...>]

[A better fix, now for the user list too]

On Montag, 14. Juli 2008, Temlakos wrote:
> Gentlemen:
>
> Today I upgraded to SMW 1.2 on all the wikis that I administer. I have
> one in English and seven second-language mirrors (in German, Spanish,
> French, Hebrew, Korean, Polish, and Chinese).
>
> The French site came a cropper with the evaluation of numeric data
> types. I had understood that in the French numbering system, a period
> acts as a thousands separator, and a comma acts as a decimal separator.
>
> The French database now refuses to parse my annotated numbers containing
> periods as thousands separators. When I remove the separators, SMW
> parses them without a problem--but then in the Factbox I see an
> /ampersand/ (&) as a thousands separator.
>
> The English separators (comma for thousands, period for decimal) still
> work as well as ever.
>
> What file do I need to examine in order to correct this fault?
>
> Any assistance would be appreciated.

The problem is that the French translation uses " " as a thousands 
separator, which is indeed suitable for French, and so should be kept in the 
translation.

However, SMW does not support multi-letter separator strings, and the 
translation apparently was made by someone without testing it. The problem is 
in the PHP method for number formatting which can only use one symbol for 
each separator. 

I have implemented this differently in SMW/SVN now, so that the current SVN 
version can use multi-letter separators like  . The current version also 
will generally accept spaces in numbers, since one would probably write "1 
234" instead of "1 234" in the input.

To update this on existing 1.2 sites, update from SVN now, or download and 
update the following files selectively:

http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/includes/SMW_GlobalFunctions.php

http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/SemanticMediaWiki/includes/SMW_DV_Number.php

Alternatively, you can edit the file languages/SMW_Messages.php to change 
the "smw_kiloseparator" around line 958 from " " to " ".

Regards,

Markus

>
> Temlakos
>
> PS: SMW_refreshData.php did not die with my upgrade--not when I followed
> instructions to the letter. I did have to correct a problem with an
> unbalanced parenthesis that I had not noticed in my SMW_DV_HxDate.php
> file. No "killed" message, no "regex too long" message.
>
> Temlakos
>
>
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-- 
Markus Krötzsch
Semantic MediaWiki    http://semantic-mediawiki.org
http://korrekt.org    ma...@se...