949074 - Provide some sort of basic localization support for <input type=number> in Firefox for Android and Firefox OS

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

https://jwatt.org/2013/12/11/input-type-number-coming-to-mozilla

The support for <input type=number> in Nightly and Aurora 28 only supports period as a decimal separator. Is there some sort of temporary hack we can use to make <input type=number> usable for non-English speaking users for Firefox 28? Perhaps even as basic as trying to parse the number and, if it fails, try to reparse it again with any single instance of the comma replaced with a period? I don't know how complex international numbering formatting is, so I've no idea if that's just not good enough. Can anyone with more knowledge about this comment?

Comment 1

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

v29 should hopefully have a proper solution based on ICU. If the ICU code was simple it might even be possible to uplift that for 28.

I have no time to work on this before next year other than the most simple of solutions though. If someone else wants to take this on I'd be very happy. Basically it would involve replacing this call with something that handles i10n:

https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/content/html/content/src/HTMLInputElement.cpp?rev=1949b601ca45#4449

Comment 2

[(no longer active)]

Here's the relevant code from chromium: <http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/blink/trunk/Source/platform/text/PlatformLocale.cpp#l351>

Comment 3

[B.J. Herbison]

A hack of parsing with comma replaced by period badly interacts with using commas as digit separators (999+1 = 1,000).

(I just created bug 953338 on the topic of the current comma separator support.)

Comment 4

[Florian Bender]

You could try to look at any [lang] attribute along the DOM tree, and compile a list of languages that use comma as a decimal separator to match against. That's likely a bit more complicated, but allows for a deterministic behaviour and thus (always working) workarounds.

Comment 5

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

(In reply to Jonathan Watt [:jwatt] from comment #1)
> v29 should hopefully have a proper solution based on ICU. If the ICU code
> was simple it might even be possible to uplift that for 28.

Except that Firefox for Android and Firefox OS don't include ICU, so fixing bug 844744 doesn't help them. I'm morphing this bug to cover creating some sort of basic support for them.