Re: zero-digit

Subject: Re: zero-digit
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 08:43:17 -0500
At 8:03 PM -0500 11/30/00, G. Ken Holman wrote:

Because of the leading paragraph, I never interpreted the attributes to mean anything other than the format pattern ... what indication did you have that these attributes were germane elsewhere?

James Clark just told me that changing the zero digit will indeed change the 1 digit, 2 digit, and so on. This is not very well documented in either Java or XSLT, but it is indeed the expected behavior. For example, setting the zero-digit to A would set


1 to B
2 to C
3 to D
4 to E
5 to F
6 to G
7 to H
8 to I
9 to J

The subsequent characters follow in their Unicode order. This is how java.text.DecimalFormat behaves, and there's a very clouded description of this at http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.1/docs/api/java.text.DecimalFormat.html
Specifically, "This class only handles localized digits where the 10 digits are contiguous in Unicode, from 0 to 9. Other digits sets (such as superscripts) would need a different subclass," but to really see what's going on you have to look at the Java source code since the JavaDoc is incomplete. I should probably file a bug on this at the Java Developer Connection.


The XSLT spec is even less clear, but I'm willing to accept James Clark's interpretation as authoritative there, though I do think this all needs to be made explicit in the next version of the spec.
--


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