Hi, Trying to reach a better and more grammatically correct plural form for Arabic, we bumped into this issue, we thought we should know what developers think about this before making a decision. I know that you guys are not arabic savvy, but I'll try to make it as simple as possible.
Suppose the string: "There are %d files in directory %s". In arabic, for some plural forms, it would make more sense to omit %d and express it by words. By saying "more sense", I mean it would stand up as particularly inappropriate and inaccurate to include the number. Putting the number in parenthesis would be less than elegant. I'm not sure whether all string manipulation is done in a manner similar to printf, however, according to this: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/printf.html Arguments can be shuffled around or omitted all together, so, in our example, we can say printf("There are %d files in directory %s", 15, "dir"); When the number is OK to be printed. However, in the example of plural form (n=1), the traditional way would have have us write something similar to: printf("There is %d file in directory %s", 1, "dir"); The output in arabic will be akin to saying in English: "there is 1 a file in directory dir". (I hope you understand) But: printf("There (text replacement) in directory %2$s", 1, "dir"); Would be more correct. This issue comes up in 3 plural forms overall. According to a test I've just done with ascii chars that would work, try this at the cmd: echo 'int main() { printf("%2$d \n", 1, 2);}' > test.c ; gcc -w test.c -o output ; ./output As I said, I'm not sure whether will this work in all environments, I don't know what the implications will be for trying such a thing. It could possibly lead to segmentation faults if not supported or it could simply write incorrect characters. There is also the security issue of string buffers. Please let us know what you think, questions are welcome. Djihed (of Arabeyes.org) _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n