Re: address@hidden: GNU Coding Standards, internatialisation and plurals]

[Bruce Korb]

Karl Berry wrote:

> Another thing worth mentioning is that it is better to limit strings
> to be translated to one number argument per sentence unit (i.e.
> "Searched %d directories.  Found %d files"  or "Searched %d
> directories and found %d files" rather than "Found %d files in %d
> directories") as some languages may prefer to express the arguments in
> reverse order ("In %d directories found %d files"), which printf would
> probably not take kindly to.

Actually, in reasonably recent versions of printf, this is handled
via "... %2$d ... %1$d...".  That syntax was added specifically for
this issue.  printf libraries that do not support this are now very
old.  If you care about such systems, there are add-on libraries about
that you can include with your project sources that handle this
correctly.

Cheers - Bruce