[Interest] represent QHostAddress as locale dependent string

[Konrad Rosenbaum]

Hi,

On Thu, September 21, 2017 09:42, Manner Róbert wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 5:49 PM, Thiago Macieira
> <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
> wrote:
>> IP addresses are not localiseable.
>>
>
> I understand your point, and most probably there are bigger problems in
> the
> world than this... I just wish if I knew if this is really a problem for
> arabic users, never using myself apps other than english.
> I would suspect arabic users got used to that numbers look sometimes
> arabic
> sometimes not, similarly like us hungarians got used to the partial
> translations half the app remaining in english, or even worse.
>
> Still, it could be a useful feature to add such a helper function
> somewhere
> in Qt: even if ip addresses are not localisable, numbers are. And ip
> addresses are multiple numbers. If you would have such, perhaps more
> applications would represent them correctly.

You really do not want to open this can of worms!

IPv4 uses dot separated decimal numbers. So far so good.

European/Latin derived scripts are left to right. Arabic and other Semitic
scripts are right to left. Fortunately they use the dot in a very similar
way to Latin based scripts. However: after you translated the digits from
Latin looking arabic numerals to arabic looking arabic numerals - do you
sort the 4 numbers from left to right or from right to left?

Japanese, Chinese and several other languages have similar properties.
Some of them use different symbols instead of dots where Latin based
scripts use the dot. How do you display IPv4 addresses there?

IPv6 is even more interesting: it uses hexadecimal numbers separated by
colons. In addition to the IPv4 problems: How do you translate the letters
and what do you do with the colons?

No other program tries to localize IP addresses precisely because it leads
to these kinds of problems. Don't start! Keep it simple.

Also: always using digits/letters/symbols from the latin plane of Unicode
is a pretty good signal to the user that this is formatted left-to-right.

BTW: we Europeans still use the same arabic order of digits (highest left)
which is quite normal for arabic speakers (speaking the lowest digit
first), but awkward for some European languages (like German where in most
cases we also speak the lowest digit first in two-digit numbers but read
from left to right or we need to count digits before we know what the
first word is). But we think it is perfectly normal to do so!

In short: stop worrying! The locals have developed ways to deal with those
quirks.



    Konrad