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Posted to dev@ant.apache.org by Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org> on 2008/08/22 12:55:37 UTC

Anybody familiar with ChoiceFormat? Issue 44659

Hi all,

DateUtils.formatElapsedTime returns different results depending on the
current locale if the time is bigger than 1000 minutes.

Under the covers we use a MessageFormat

    private static final MessageFormat MINUTE_SECONDS
             = new MessageFormat("{0}{1}");

where {0} is set to be

    private static final ChoiceFormat MINUTES_FORMAT =
            new ChoiceFormat(LIMITS, MINUTES_PART);

and MINUTES_PART is

    private static final String[] MINUTES_PART = {"", "1 minute ", "{0,number} minutes "};

ChoiceFormat doesn't provide any way to set the Locale and setting it
on the "outer" MessageFormat doesn't have any effect.  ChoiceFormat
does provide a getFormats method that return Object[] and I hoped it
would return the DecimalFormat instance used in the last case, but it
just returns the same String[] passed in (wonder why it returns an
Object[]).

Setting setGroupingUsed on the choice format doesn't have any effect
either and I don't see a way to specify either the locale or the
grouping inside the pattern - well, unless I use a pattern like
############### (Long.MAX_VALUE / 60 / 1000 should fit into this).

My preference would be to use Locale.US since the text for "minute" is
English anyway.  Does anybody see a cleaner way than either use the
pattern above or implementing the logic of ChoiceFormat ourselves?

Stefan

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Re: Anybody familiar with ChoiceFormat? Issue 44659

Posted by Steve Loughran <st...@apache.org>.

Stefan Bodewig wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Aug 2008, Matt Benson <gu...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> Looking back at this again, I think having the number
>> formatted according to the US Locale would be more
>> confusing than by the default Locale, speaking without
>> the perspective of a person who typically uses e.g. .
>> as a thousands separator and , as a decimal separator.
> 
> I am one of those people and to me it is more confusing to have Ant
> use German number formatting but say "minutes" instead of "Minuten".
> (well, would be since I haven't seen builds taking > 1000 minutes
> myself).
> 
> When copying files we don't use a number format at all and thus end up
> with a pure number without any separators at all.
> 
> I wouldn't expect that too many builds take tens of thousands of
> minutes so a number with or without thousands separator may be as
> readable as the other in out case.
> 
> AFAICT making the thousands separator go away takes the same amount of
> coding effort as making it use the US locale.
> 

I use a logger that tells me when the build finished; this is so that 
when I switch to different windows and back I can see if a build was 
recent or not. There's a good case for making the date/time info 
localised, if you want to do everything properly.

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