Module talk:Lang-zh

Double-quotes around glosses

Is there a reason we use double-quotes rather than single-quotes to show the output of |tr=? MOS:SIMPLEGLOSS suggests we should prefer singles. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 17:37, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Because |l= is used for literal translations & glosses, and |tr= is (much more rarely) used for non-literal translations. Remsense诉 17:39, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Aha, that makes sense. So I have probably been misusing |tr= when I should have been using |l=. Thank you! — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 18:03, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Commas within literal glosses

What should we do if there needs to be a comma within a literal translation? I noticed this on Yi Jian Mei (song), where the quotes should be placed around the whole comma-separated phrase, not individually around each side of the comma. pacificboy (talk) 03:56, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

My assumption when adding this feature was that if one needed to add a comma, it should probably be treated as a proper translation, not a gloss. It turns out I never use this formatting, so I could very plausibly disable it. Remsense诉 05:49, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense! I’ll convert it to a translation. Thanks. pacificboy (talk) 02:45, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 17 August 2024

I propose the following changes to add Tâi-lô romanization support. Of course, POJ covers 95% of Hokkien/Minnan use cases (hence why I have added the "tailo" IANA subtag) but it could still be useful for Taiwanese-specific pages. Additions and modifications below:

--- Module:Lang-zh
+++ Module:Lang-zh

@@ after line 29 @@ local labels = {
 	["sl"] = "Sidney Lau",
    ["poj"] = "Pe̍h-ōe-jī",
+	["tl"] = "Tâi-lô",
	["zhu"] = "Zhuyin Fuhao",
	["l"] = "lit.",
    
@@ after line 46 @@ local wlinks  = {
 	["poj"] = "Pe̍h-ōe-jī",
+	["tl"] = "Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn",
    
@@ after line 63 @@ local ISOlang = {
 	["poj"] = "nan-Latn",
+	["tl"] = "nan-Latn-tailo",

@@ after line 74 @@ local italic  = {
 	["poj"] = true,
+	["tl"] = true,

@@ at line 136 @@
-	local orderlist = {"c", "s", "t", "p", "tp", "w", "j", "cy", "sl", "poj", "zhu", "l", "tr"}
+	local orderlist = {"c", "s", "t", "p", "tp", "w", "j", "cy", "sl", "poj", "tl", "zhu", "l", "tr"}

@@ after line 150 @@ if (poj1) then
		orderlist[4] = "poj"
-		orderlist[5] = "p"
-		orderlist[6] = "tp"
-		orderlist[7] = "w"
-		orderlist[8] = "j"
-		orderlist[9] = "cy"
-		orderlist[10] = "sl"
+		orderlist[5] = "tl"
+		orderlist[6] = "p"
+		orderlist[7] = "tp"
+		orderlist[8] = "w"
+		orderlist[9] = "j"
+		orderlist[10] = "cy"
+		orderlist[11] = "sl"
	end

MSG17 (talk) 15:53, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

@MSG17: This sounds reasonable, and would be helpful on pages such as Penang Hokkien where both POJ and TL are used in the article text. @Pppery or @Jonesey95, would you be able to help here? Freelance Intellectual (talk) 13:03, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

I'll take a look at this ASAP, thank you for your improvements! Remsense ‥ 论 13:06, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

 Done Remsense ‥ 论 13:48, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Further romanization discussion

Coming off of my request to add Tâi-lô, what other romanization systems should be added to the template? I feel like Pha̍k-fa-sṳ annd Wugniu could be helpful. I don't see any IANA latn subtages for other Sinitic languages however. MSG17 (talk) 15:53, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Trailing bold in l= not being removed

In

{{zh|t=竹子林站|j=Zuk1 Zi2 Lam4 Zaam6|l = '''Bamboo Forest station'''}}

, the opening bold markup is properly removed, but the trailing bold markup is not removed. It looks like the regular expression at

term = string.gsub(term, "^([ \"']*)(.*)([ \"']*)$", "%2")

needs some adjustment to the middle wildcard search. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:23, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: This is because the * operator is greedy, so .* matches everything else in the string. Changing .* to .*? would make it lazy, so that the final term catches all trailing characters. In other words, change the line of code to:

term = string.gsub(term, "^([ \"']*)(.*?)([ \"']*)$", "%2")

Freelance Intellectual (talk) 13:51, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! That fixed the problem at Zhuzilin station and probably other pages. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:26, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for fixing my shoddy regex, by the way. Remsense ‥ 论 13:05, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 and Remsense: On further reflection, this doesn't work as intended. I had thought the string was a regex, but it is in fact a Lua pattern, which is slightly different. The Lua equivalent of *? is - which would give:

term = string.gsub(term, "^([ \"']*)(.-)([ \"']*)$", "%2")

Writing .*? in Lua (as I suggested above) actually means greedily matching all characters (.*) followed by a single question mark (? can also be an operator, but Lua pattern operators can't be nested so in this context it is interpreted as a literal). So actually the new pattern usually doesn't make a substitution, unless there is a question mark. This means it usually fails, e.g. where there are multiple glosses separated by commas and spaces, the spaces are not stripped. However, looking at what the pattern match applies to, I'm not completely sure I understand why the quotes should be stripped in the first place (is there a set of testcases to check against?). At Zhuzilin station, the current code makes no substitution, and so it keeps the bold formatting, presumably as intended. The old code meant that the bold formatting was stripped at the beginning and not the end, so the rest of the article became bold (which was a bad and confusing error). Correcting .*? to .- as above would strip both, making it impossible to add bold formatting. Is the intention to catch cases where an editor unnecessarily adds quotes to the gloss? Is this a common problem? If so, is removing the ability to add bold and italic formatting a fair price to pay?

If we want to strip one quote mark but no more (so that we catch editors manually adding quotes, but allow formatting), pattern matching is a bit more complicated. I think it would be easiest to separate the stripping of whitespace and quotes. When stripping one single quote, we need to check that there isn't more than one, but we also need to allow the string to contain an apostrophe (so we can't just use [^']- in the middle) and a gloss could potentially be a single character (so we can't just use [^'].-[^'] in the middle). So it seems easiest to strip the leading and trailing quotes separately. This gives three lines (I've also removed two sets of brackets that were capturing substrings that weren't used):

term = string.gsub(term, "^ *(.-) *$", "%1")
term = string.gsub(term, "^[\"']?([^\"'].-)$", "%1")
term = string.gsub(term, "^(.-[^\"'])[\"']?$", "%1")

Freelance Intellectual (talk) 15:43, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

I think it's fine to strip all quote marks, in any quantity. That was the original intent of the code, and I don't see any complaints on this page. Adding bold to text is probably against WP:MOS, and adding italics should be done with a parameter. People can use <b>...</b> and <i>...</i> tags if they insist on them. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:51, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Okay. I had taken your comment about fixing the Zhuzilin station article to mean that keeping the bold markup was intended, but I can see why it could be discouraged. I've also just found Template:Lang-zh/testcases (I had only looked under Module:Lang-zh before), and I don't see any testcases for stripping markup. So, if stripping markup is the desired functionality, the .- version above would work. I think it would make sense to document this, since there are three different kinds of thing being stripped: whitespace, markup, and quotes (double quotes aren't markup). It could be documented either on Template:Lang-zh/doc or directly as a code comment next to the line we're discussing, e.g. "remove trailing and leading spaces, quotes, and bold/italic markup". Freelance Intellectual (talk) 20:39, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Currently, this stripping only applies to literal glosses and not translations, but they should reasonably be treated the same. So, fixing the pattern, matching all whitespace (not just spaces), expanding the comments, and applying the same to the translation, I suggest changing lines 236-247 to the following:

			elseif (part == "l") then
				local terms = ""
				-- put individual, potentially comma-separated glosses in single quotes
				-- (first strip leading and trailing whitespace and quotes, including bold/italic markup)
				for term in val:gmatch("[^;,]+") do
					term = string.gsub(term, "^([%s\"']*)(.-)([%s\"']*)$", "%2")
					terms = terms .. "'" .. term .. "', "
				end
				val = string.sub(terms, 1, -3)
			elseif (part == "tr") then
				-- put translations in double quotes
				-- (first strip leading and trailing spaces and quotes, including bold/italic markup)
				val = string.gsub(val, "^([%s\"']*)(.-)([%s\"']*)$", "%2")
				val = """ .. val .. """
			end

Freelance Intellectual (talk) 09:31, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 and Remsense: What do you think? Are you happy with the above suggestion?

Also, instead of directly using a Lua string pattern, it might be more readable and maintainable to use an existing function for stripping leading and trailing characters, namely mw.text.trim:

			elseif (part == "l") then
				local terms = ""
				-- put individual, potentially comma-separated glosses in single quotes
				-- (first strip leading and trailing whitespace and quotes, including bold/italic markup)
				for term in val:gmatch("[^;,]+") do
					term = mw.text.trim(term, "%s\"'")
					terms = terms .. "'" .. term .. "', "
				end
				val = string.sub(terms, 1, -3)
			elseif (part == "tr") then
				-- put translations in double quotes
				-- (first strip leading and trailing spaces and quotes, including bold/italic markup)
				val = mw.text.trim(val, "%s\"'")
				val = """ .. val .. """
			end

Freelance Intellectual (talk) 09:02, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 and Remsense: pinging again. The current code inserts quotes incorrectly, e.g. on the following pages you can see an opening quote followed by a space: Gun (staff), Indonesian slang, Ping On. The code above would fix this. Freelance Intellectual (talk) 14:23, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Reping Remsense. Could you please look at this? I think you're one of the only template editors who has enough understanding of Chinese orthography to understand what is being changed here and why. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:19, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Will have this looked at ASAP. Huge apologies for letting it slip through the cracks for months. Remsense ‥ 论 23:39, 16 November 2024 (UTC)