Re: String changes

On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Tom Lane wrote:

> It would only help if you were to find and nuke every single instance of
> gettext("\n"), and make sure that no new ones get introduced. I think
> that adds more current and future work than the translators are likely
> to save.

Well, I did.

> And no, I don't believe that translators will expend great
> effort on translating it ;-)

Oh, you'd be surprised of how many such things that translators complain
about :-)

The reason why strings like "\n", " ", "\t " and such things are hard is
because often it's most often used to layout things. And when you change
the translation in one place the translated string is usually longer
(english is fairly compact), then the translator have to fix up whitespace
to make it match the other strings. For example "\n" maybe should have
been translated to "\n\n" if some other string had to be two lines in a
language with longer sentences then english (like Finnish, or to a
smaller extent swedish).

But it's just a string. It won't change the world in any way! I'll not send
more mails about it.

--
/Dennis