Placeholder validation - optional placeholders

List of optional placeholders

Here is the list of placeholders that are set to optional by default:

1. Message format - single layer of MessageFormat pattern
2. HTML formatting tags - e.g. <strong></strong>, <br/>
• <b> Bold
• <strong> Important
• <i> Italic
• <em> Emphasized
• <mark> Marked
• <small> Small
• <del> Deleted
• <ins> Inserted
• <sub> Subscript
• <sup> Superscript
3. HTML entities (e.g. &#012;, &#8217;)
4. Placeholders (%d and %s) in plural strings (see below)

OneSky only supports the exact match of placeholders but does not support translatable pattern matching. Identified translatable patterns are treated as optional placeholders to preserve functionalities of click to copy while allowing the content to change.

Plural string placeholders

Placeholders in plural strings are automatically set as optional because the required placeholder functionality is too strict for plural strings. Let's take the following plural string as an example:

one: %d book

other: %d books

If %d was required, the plural form "one" can only be translated to "1 livre" in French. This will restrict translations if the translator preferred "a book", or "un livre" in French.

OneSky also will not check placeholders by the plural form due to the following reasons:

1. The plural forms of the same name, say "one", are defined differently across different languages.
2. Plural forms do not exist in all languages, and for some such as from Chinese to English or English to Russian, there will be no plural form to reference from.