The Pathedral and the Kazoo - i18n

Does your LibreOffice locale need a date acceptance pattern for incomplete date input?

nospam@example.com (erAck) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:09:00 +0200

As explained in an earlier article a new feature will be available with LibreOffice 3.6 that limits date recognition of input to predefined locale dependent patterns to prevent erroneous detection of dates. To be able to input incomplete dates a locale needs date acceptance patterns defined in its locale data, quite a lot submissions of such patterns have already been included, but many locales do not have any pattern assigned yet. For these locales date input will only be possible as a complete date, no incomplete dates will be accepted. Maybe your locale should be enabled for incomplete date input but isn't yet? Then please submit the pattern(s), either as a comment to this blog post, or on the LibreOffice l10n mailing list if you are involved with LibO localization anyway, or simply mail me.

Locales without explicit DateAcceptancePattern elements:
(one implicit full date pattern is always generated)

ak_GH ar_DZ ar_EG ar_OM ast_ES az_AZ bn_IN bs_BA cv_RU da_DK de_AT de_CH de_LI de_LU dsb_DE dz_BT ee_GH el_GR en_AU en_CA en_GB en_GH en_JM en_NA en_ZA eo es_AR es_BO es_CL es_CO es_CR es_DO es_EC es_GT es_PE eu fa_IR fo_FO fr_CA fur_IT fy_NL gl_ES gsc_FR gug_PY ha_GH haw_US he_IL hi_IN hil_PH hr_HR hsb_DE ht_HT hu_HU hy_AM ia id_ID it_CH jbo ka_GE kk_KZ kl_GL km_KH ko_KR ku_TR ky_KG la_VA lb_LU lg_UG lif_NP ln_CD lo_LA ltg_LV lv_LV mai_IN mk_MK ml_IN mn_MN mt_MT my_MM myv_RU ne_NP no_NO oc_FR om_ET or_IN pjt_AU pl_PL plt_MG ro_RO rue_SK rw_RW sc_IT sg_CF shs_CA so_SO sr_RS sv_FI sv_SE sw_TZ tg_TJ th_TH ti_ER tk_TM tpi_PG ug_CN uk_UA ur_PK uz_UZ vi_VN wa_BE zh_HK zh_MO zh_SG

Locales with explicit DateAcceptancePattern elements:

an_ES:
- D/M
be_BY:
- D/M/
- D.M.
bg_BG:
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y Г.
- D.M.Y Г.
br_FR:
- D/M
ca_ES:
- D/M
cs_CZ:
- D.M.
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
de_DE:
- D.M.
en_US:
- M/D
es_ES:
- D/M
et_EE:
- D.M
- D. M
- D.M.
- D. M.
fi_FI:
- D.M.
fr_BE:
- D/M
fr_CH:
- D/M
- D.M.
fr_FR:
- D/M
fr_LU:
- D/M
gd_GB:
- D/M
- D-M
is_IS:
- D/M/
- D.M.
it_IT:
- D/M
ja_JP:
- M-D
- M/D
- M／D
- Y.M.D
- Y／M／D
- Y年M月D日
- M月D日
kab_DZ:
- D/M
lt_LT:
- M-D
nl_BE:
- D/M
nl_NL:
- D-M
pt_AO:
- D-M
pt_BR:
- D/M
pt_PT:
- D-M
ru_RU:
- D.M.
- D/M/
sk_SK:
- D.M.
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
- D. M.
- D. M. Y
sl_SI:
- D. M. Y
- D.M.
- D. M.
tr_TR:
- D.M
- D/M
- D-M
zh_CN:
- M-D
- M/D
- M／D
- Y.M.D
- Y/M/D
- Y年M月D日
- M月D日
zh_TW:
- Y.M.D
- M-D
- M/D
- Y年M月D日
- M月D日

If some of the entries seem to be duplicates within a locale and include spaces, that's because they are defined both with normal space and with breaking space to accommodate both input variants.

LibreOffice date acceptance patterns

nospam@example.com (erAck) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:46:20 +0100

Abstract: Calc's (and in Writer table) cell input now needs to match locale dependent date acceptance patterns before it is recognized as a valid date.

Previously the number formatter's input scanner was very lax in what it accepted as a "valid" date. All combinations of 2-3 numbers separated by '.' '/' '-' or the locale's date separator even with blanks in between that somehow could be interpreted as a date was accepted as such, which was especially confusing with incomplete dates containing only 2 numbers that in many cases were meant as textual input instead. For example

In en-US locale, M/D is a valid date input to be interpreted as day of month of current year. However, M/D/ and M.D. were accepted as well.
In de-DE locale, D.M. is a valid date input to be interpreted as day of month of current year. However, D.M and D/M and D/M/ were accepted as well.

In case of an input like 1.2 in a de-DE locale or others using '.' separator, meant as some sort of textual numbering, this was extremely annoying, it was interpreted as 1st of February of current year and the user had to prepend a single quote / apostrophe to suppress date recognition. Similar for 1.2.3 in locales that do not use the '.' date separator.

Now, during build time for each locale one full date acceptance pattern is generated from the existing locale data's number format FormatElement with formatindex="21" that is also used to edit dates, taking the DMY order and the defined DateSeparator. For example, in the en-US locale this generates M/D/Y from the MM/DD/YYYY FormatCode, and in the de-DE locale D.M.Y from the DD.MM.YYYY code. For this to work correctly the separator used in the FormatCode must match the DateSeparator element defined in Separators. As for all rules there's one exception though ;) if the format code uses a different separator and that is one of the known '-' '.' '/' separators, a second pattern is generated using the format's separator. This as a generalized case for locales that for example may use an ISO 8601 edit format, as hu-HU does, regardless what the date separator is defined to.

Additionally to the date acceptance pattern every locale of course still accepts input in an ISO 8601 Y-M-D pattern, and since LibreOffice 3.5 that also leads to the YYYY-MM-DD format being applied.

Localizers, HEADS UP please

If in your locale incomplete dates should be accepted or additional patterns that vary from the generated full date pattern are needed, those are to be defined in the locale data LC_FORMAT element for which a new DateAcceptancePattern element exists, of which zero or more can occur before the FormatElement elements. Currently only the following patterns are defined as they are the only ones I knew were plausible:

bg-BG, a trailing breaking or non-breaking space followed by lower case or upper case Cyrillic letter GHE and a dot, as defined in the edit format
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y г.
- D.M.Y Г.
- D.M.Y Г.
de-DE, incomplete date
- D.M.
en-US, incomplete date
- M/D
sl-SI, date separator dot plus space
- D. M. Y

For example see i18npool/source/localedata/data/en_US.xml

Happy date accepting :-)

Update: an updated list of locales and patterns is available in a newer blog post.

LibreOffice possessive genitive case and partitive case month names

nospam@example.com (erAck) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:12:00 +0100

Poss...what? you may ask.. yes, the month that owns the day-of-month.

In some languages (and thus locales) a month name has different cases, depending on the context the name is used in. That's for example the case in Slavic languages, Greek, Russian, Finnish, Gaelic, ... and probably a few more I didn't hear of. Totally unknown to native English speakers ;-) (which I'm not)

a standalone month name is the nominative case, the noun, as in November
a possessive genitive case month name can be described as "the month's day", as in November's 17th
a partitive case month name can be described as "day of month", as in 17 of November

This feature in number formatting was requested for quite some time. Recently I found time to implement it. To achieve this, I added optional elements to LibreOffice's internal locale data <LC_CALENDAR><Calendar> element and implemented the general rules in the number formatter.

Locale data (submitted by localizers)

<MonthsOfYear> element, nominative (nouns) month names
- always specified
- includes <Month>, <MonthID>, <DefaultAbbrvName> and <DefautFullName> elements
<GenitiveMonths> element, genitive case month names
- optional
- follows the <MonthsOfYear> element
- consists of same elements as <MonthsOfYear> element
- if <GenitiveMonths> are not specified then <MonthsOfYear> names are used in the context of the number formatter's genitive case
<PartitiveMonths> element, partitive case month names
- optional
- follows the <GenitiveMonths> element, or follows the <MonthsOfYear> element if the <GenitiveMonths> element is not specified
- consists of same elements as <MonthsOfYear> element
- if <PartitiveMonths> are not specified then <GenitiveMonths> names are used, if that is not specified then <MonthsOfYear> names are used

Rules for use of nominative / genitive / partitive case month names in number formatter when encountering MMM or MMMM

MMM or MMMM immediately preceded or followed by a literal character other than space ⇒ nominative month name (noun), for Excel and backwards compatibility such as Finnish MMMM"ta"
no day of month (D or DD) present in format code ⇒ nominative name
day of month (D or DD) after MMM or MMMM ⇒ genitive name
- no genitive names defined ⇒ nominative names
day of month (D or DD) before MMM or MMMM ⇒ partitive name
- no partitive names defined ⇒ genitive names
  - no genitive names defined ⇒ nominative names

NOTE:

If only <MonthsOfYear> and <PartitiveMonths> are specified but not <GenitiveMonths>, then for MMM(M) D(D) formats the <MonthsOfYear> nominative name is displayed. Only for D(D) MMM(M) formats the <PartitiveMonths> name is displayed.

If only for MMM(M) D(D) formats the <GenitiveMonths> are to be displayed but nominative names for D(D) MMM(M), then specify <PartitiveMonths> identical to <MonthsOfYear>, do not omit it as otherwise it would inherit from <GenitiveMonths> again.

Screenshot

To illustrate, here's a screenshot using the Finnish fi-FI locale, Finnish is an extraordinary case that uses all three, nominative, genitive and partitive case month names.

Screenshot of nominative, genitive and partitive month names in Finnish.

Locales featuring month name cases

Currently for the following locales genitive and/or partitive case month names were contributed:

[an-ES] Aragonese, Spain
[ast-ES] Asturian, Spain
[be-BY] Belarusian, Belarus
[fi-FI] Finnish, Finland
[gd-GB] Gaelic (Scottish), United Kingdom
[la-VA] Latin, State of the Vatican City
[lt-LT] Lithuanian, Lithuania
[ru-RU] Russian, Russia

As you can see, that's only a few locales and not all that should be covered. So if you're working on localization of LibreOffice and your language uses month name cases, please contribute the locale data additions as lined out above. Best send a patch of your locale's .xml data file as attachment to the developer mailing list and I'll pick it up. If uncertain how to do that just ask and we'll help. For an example how the data looks like see i18npool/source/localedata/data/lt_LT.xml and search for GenitiveMonths. If you're interested in technical details of locale data files see i18npool/source/localedata/data/locale.dtd

Happy month casing :-)