Re: zero-digit

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo at metalab dot unc dot edu>]

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.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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