Re: messages.po HTML encoding

On 2004/02/11, at 1:45, a.h.s. boy wrote:

> When using Spanish, Swedish, etc files, however, many of the 
> translators have converted the text strings to HTML entities, e.g. 
> "español". In one way, this makes sense, since they are to be 
> displayed on a web page. But is it the right thing to do? Or should 
> such strings be in messages.po with all their accents, and converted 
> with htmlspecialchars() before output?

Yep, I guess you should. It'd not be a good idea to have accented 
characters as
entities in the .po file, because it only makes sense when gettext is 
used in
conjunction with HTML / XML. Besides you won't need to convert such 
strings into
their entitied form as long as you choose UTF-8 as the output charset.

> The issue cropped up because I'm converting the site to XHTML 1.1 
> output, and that means encoding things like ampersands. I have 
> functions for creating drop-down menus (e.g. "categories" and 
> "languages"). If a menu has an item like a "Crime & Punishment" 
> category, I'd want to convert it to "Crime & Punishment" for XHTML 
> compliance. But I don't want the language menu to RE-encode 
> "español" as "espanñol", which would screw 
> everything up.
>
> So what's the best way to handle the relationship between HTML 
> entities and gettext-based messages.po files?

In fact, the larger question is: do HTML entities really need to be 
entity-ized on utf-8 pages, whose character set actually should be 
capable of displaying the characters? Obviously "htmlspecialchars()" 
handles characters that cause output problems (like < and >, which 
indicate tag opening/closing), but for a utf-8 based system, "n tilde" 
doesn't need to be encoded at all, does it?
>
> It seems like early HTML education would state categorically that 
> "español" needs to be written as "espag&ntilde;ol" on a web page, but 
> that isn't really true for utf-8 pages, is it?
>
> spud.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> a.h.s. boy
> spud(at)nothingness.org            "as yes is to if,love is to yes"
> http://www.nothingness.org/
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