[ui-best-practices-working-group] How do you handle apostrophes?

["Peter Mork" <stsmork@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I have a general question about the localization architecture of Eclipse (or 
Java-based applications in general); please redirect me if this is not the 
right forum to ask.

My question is this: how do handle the apostrophe character? It is 
problematic for two reasons: first, the FormatMessage Java class treats it 
as an escape character and therefore, messages that are passed to this class 
must contain doubled apostrophes ('') instead of single ones ('). Since 
translators have no idea whether a message is processed via FormatMessage or 
not, they have no clue whether they should double their apostrophes or not.

The other problem is similar to this: if HTML output is generated via JSP 
pages and the page contains dynamically generated JavaScript, we hit the 
same problem again if the code uses constructs like this:

System.out.println("alert('" + bundle.getString(ALERT_MSG) + "');");

This will throw a JavaScript syntax error if the message happens to contain 
an apostrophe character. Again, the translator who is workin on the message 
file (.properties or whatever format) only, would not know that the 
apostrophe character needs to be written as \u0027 in this case.

Is there a generally accepted solution or best practice to tackle these 
situations?

Thanks,
Peter

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