[drupal-devel] [bug] Form element labels should not show a : if the label ends in a '?'

[chx]

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/24482

 Project:      Drupal
 Version:      cvs
 Component:    theme system
 Category:     bug reports
 Priority:     minor
 Assigned to:  Anonymous
 Reported by:  rbarreca
 Updated by:   chx
 Status:       patch

On a side: yesterday hell froze over, Apple went to Intel and what's
important to us, Debian sarge became stable. So, no more whining about
PCRE -- now can tell everyone (rightly) that anything before 4.3.3 is
ancient, and even Debian sports 4.3.10 so...




chx



Previous comments:
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June 7, 2005 - 19:31 : rbarreca

Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/patch_no_colon_after_question_mark.patch (710 bytes)

Not sure if this goes under theme system or other.  


When fields end in a '?', the theme_form_element function shows a label
like this "Label?:" which looks weird.  I added a patch to check if it
ends in a question mark, and if so, don't add the colon to the label.


I know this function is themeable so I could've done it there, but I
feel this should be the default behavior for all those fields like "Are
you a smoker?", "Add to front page?", etc.




------------------------------------------------------------------------

June 7, 2005 - 21:12 : Steven

This patch isn't very flexible as it only deals with question marks, and
ASCII ones at that. A better solution would be one that checks for any
punctuation at the end (character class Po), but then we'd get people
complaining about their PCRE not supporting Unicode again.


Still, I can't think of any situation inside Drupal where we have a
question mark at the end of a label. It is not something I'd advise in
any case. Instead of "Are you a smoker?" we tend to have a checkbox "I
am a smoker.".


As it is a themable function, I'm leaning towards not committing it.


About the actual code, I think substr($label, -1) would be a more
readable version of selecting the last byte.




------------------------------------------------------------------------

June 7, 2005 - 21:27 : rbarreca

Yeah, it's not such a big deal.  I guess as my case is pretty unique,
using a themed function would be the way to go.  Thanks anyways.




------------------------------------------------------------------------

June 7, 2005 - 21:27 : drumm

I think any change like this should come with guidelines for usage. In
English we can have form labels end in ':', '?', or nothing. When is
the use of each appropriate? I think the current ':'-only code is good
in that it provides consistency. I suspect that any label ending in '?'
can be effectively rephrased. I'm not much of an expert on interface
element labeling, but I think these issues should be considered.


And this change would need to be implemented on more form elements than
text fields.