Unusual punctuation can break functionality

[Zayed Al-Saidi]

Hi Tobias,

In Arabic we don't have this issue. However, we have a bigger one :)
the converter runner is not working with Eastern Arabic numerals[1].
For example, this will work:
100 متر إلى قدم
(which mean 100 meter to feet) but this will not work when use my
locale which using Easter Arabic numerals:
١٠٠ متر إلى قدم

I'm not sure about the other numeral systems [2] but I think they are
treated the same. Others can confirm.



1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals
2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numeral_systems

On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 9:47 PM Tobias Fella <fella at posteo.de> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Sometimes, developers use translated strings in ways that require an
> exact format in the translation to implement some functionality.
> Consider for example [0], where we want to know all variants a language
> might have of the words meaning "in", "to", or "as" in english,
> separated by semicolons. This is then split at the semicolons and used
> for some rudimentary text parsing.
>
> Some languages (at least french, I don't know about others) put a space
> before all punctuation. While that's expected (and totally fine) for the
> normal case of things that will actually be shown as text, in this case,
> the code wasn't prepared to handle the extra space, causing this feature
> to not work in french. For this case, i have changed the code to ignore
> the extra space, and changed the context to clarify that there should
> not be any spaces here ([1]). It would nevertheless be good to fix the
> french translation here and watch out for similar cases.
>
> Sending this to the -doc list, as I'm not sure if this also affects
> other languages :)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tobias
>
>
> [0]
> https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/blob/8133e3b2c724e099cff9e539e5fad937c3bca023/runners/converter/converterrunner.cpp#L40
>
> [1] https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/1128
>