NAME

       Locale::Maketext::Cookbook - recipes for using Locale::Maketext

INTRODUCTION

       This is a work in progress. Not much progress by now :-)

ONESIDED LEXICONS

       Adapted from a suggestion by Dan Muey

       It may be common (for example at your main lexicon) that the hash keys and values
       coincide. Like that

           q{Hello, tell me your name}
             => q{Hello, tell me your name}

       It would be nice to just write:

           q{Hello, tell me your name} => ''

       and have this magically inflated to the first form.  Among the advantages of such
       representation, that would lead to smaller files, less prone to mistyping or mispasting,
       and handy to someone translating it which can simply copy the main lexicon and enter the
       translation instead of having to remove the value first.

       That can be achieved by overriding "init" in your class and working on the main lexicon
       with code like that:

           package My::I18N;
           ...

           sub init {
               my $lh = shift; # a newborn handle
               $lh->SUPER::init();
               inflate_lexicon(\%My::I18N::en::Lexicon);
               return;
           }

           sub inflate_lexicon {
               my $lex = shift;
               while (my ($k, $v) = each %$lex) {
                   $v = $k if !defined $v || $v eq '';
               }
           }

       Here we are assuming "My::I18N::en" to own the main lexicon.

       There are some downsides here: the size economy will not stand at runtime after this
       "init()" runs. But it should not be that critical, since if you don't have space for that,
       you won't have space for any other language besides the main one as well. You could do
       that too with ties, expanding the value at lookup time which should be more time expensive
       as an option.

DECIMAL PLACES IN NUMBER FORMATTING

       After CPAN RT #36136 (https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=36136)

       The documentation of Locale::Maketext advises that the standard bracket method "numf" is
       limited and that you must override that for better results. It even suggests the use of
       Number::Format.

       One such defect of standard "numf" is to not be able to use a certain decimal precision.
       For example,

           $lh->maketext('pi is [numf,_1]', 355/113);

       outputs

           pi is 3.14159292035398

       Since pi X 355/116 is only accurate to 6 decimal places, you would want to say:

           $lh->maketext('pi is [numf,_1,6]', 355/113);

       and get "pi is 3.141592".

       One solution for that could use "Number::Format" like that:

           package Wuu;

           use base qw(Locale::Maketext);

           use Number::Format;

           # can be overridden according to language conventions
           sub _numf_params {
               return (
                   -thousands_sep  => '.',
                   -decimal_point  => ',',
                   -decimal_digits => 2,
               );
           }

           # builds a Number::Format
           sub _numf_formatter {
               my ($lh, $scale) = @_;
               my @params = $lh->_numf_params;
               if ($scale) { # use explicit scale rather than default
                   push @params, (-decimal_digits => $scale);
               }
               return Number::Format->new(@params);
           }

           sub numf {
               my ($lh, $n, $scale) = @_;
               # get the (cached) formatter
               my $nf = $lh->{__nf}{$scale} ||= $lh->_numf_formatter($scale);
               # format the number itself
               return $nf->format_number($n);
           }

           package Wuu::pt;

           use base qw(Wuu);

       and then

           my $lh = Wuu->get_handle('pt');
           $lh->maketext('A [numf,_1,3] km de distancia', 1550.2222);

       would return "A 1.550,222 km de distancia".

       Notice that the standard utility methods of "Locale::Maketext" are irremediably limited
       because they could not aim to do everything that could be expected from them in different
       languages, cultures and applications. So extending "numf", "quant", and "sprintf" is
       natural as soon as your needs exceed what the standard ones do.