1374246 - fluent.migrate: Support leading and trailing whitespace

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Localization Infrastructure and Tools :: Fluent Migration, enhancement)

Description

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

In cases when the legacy translation has leading or trailing whitespace, the migration transforms should automatically encode it with a special placeable.

    "   Foo"

can become

    {""}   Foo

or

    {"   "}Foo

Comment 1

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

Do you have stats on how often does it happen and how often is it intentional? Maybe we shouldn't really do this if it's always unintentional. Or maybe we should reconsider FTL syntax for this feature if there are legitimate use cases...

Comment 2

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

I don't have any precise data on how often this is used. I assume this is most useful for putting text around DOM elements—something that Fluent solves in a more elegant manner with DOM overlays. For this case, the migration code and the serialization actually work well because the whitespace is only considered leading/trailing in the legacy translation; it ends up being inside of the translation in the migrated Fluent message.

To fix this, we'd need to add code to CONCAT which detects leading/trailing whitespace in the first and the last element and converts it to {""}.

Comment 3

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

> To fix this, we'd need to add code to CONCAT which detects leading/trailing whitespace in the first and the last element and converts it to {""}.

Correction: this should go into Transform.pattern_of. CONCAT should then reinsert whitespace-only StringExpressions not at the extreme positions back into the adjacent TextElements.

Comment 4

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

I ended up fixing this as part of https://github.com/projectfluent/python-fluent/commit/6e14e772c973f54a7692bcfbd2a8932107e8c8b5.