What does the I18N mean?

Question

I came across a comment in some code referencing the specified code: "I18N safe".

What does it mean?

Answer 1

I + (about 18 characters) + N = Internationalization N

Security

I18N means that during design and development steps have been taken to facilitate localization (L10N) at a later point.

Answer 2

This most often refers to code or constructs ready for the I18N — this is easily supported by the general I18N methods. For example, the following is ready:

printf(loadResourceString("Result is %s"), result); 

while the following:

 printf("Result is " + result); 

because the word order may vary in different languages. Unicode support, international date formatting, etc. Also qualified.

EDIT: added loadResourceString to make the example close to real life.

Answer 3

Internationalization. Its conclusion is "the letter I, eighteen letters, the letter N".

Answer 4

i18n means i nternationalizatio n => i ( 18 letters ) n. Code marked as i18n secure will be code that correctly processes non-ASCII character data (such as Unicode).

Answer 5

I18N stands for internationalization.

Answer 6

i18n is short for "internationalization." This was invented by DEC and actually uses the lowercase letters i and n.

As a support: L10n means “localization” and uses capital L to distinguish it from lower case.

Answer 7

Without any additional information, I would suggest that this means that the code processes the text as UTF8 and is local. For more information, see this Wikipedia article .

Can you be more specific?

Answer 8

I18N stands for Internationalization .

In short: the secure I18N code means that it uses some sort of lookup table for texts in the user interface. To do this, you need to support non-ASCII encodings. It may seem easy, but there are some gotchas .

Answer 9

i18n-safe is an indefinite concept. This usually refers to code that will work in an international environment - with different languages, keyboards, character sets, etc. The true i18n-safe code is hard to write down.

This means that the code cannot rely on:

sizeof (char) == 1

because this character can be a 4-byte UTF-32 character or a 2-byte UTF-16 character and occupy several bytes.

This means that the code cannot rely on the length of the string equal to the number of bytes in the string. This means that the code cannot rely on null bytes in a string denoting a nul terminator. This means that code cannot simply assume ASCII encoding of text files, lines, and inputs.

Answer 10

i18n deals with - moving hard-coded strings from code (not everything should be handy) so that they can be localized / translated (localization == L10n), as others have pointed out, and also deals with - a language-sensitive method such as - text processing methods (how many words in Japanese text are far), order / comparison in different languages ​​/ writing systems, - date / time measurement (the simplest example shows am / pm for the USA, 24-hour clock for France, for example, transition to more complex calendars for specific countries), - treatment ar bskim or Hebrew (the orientation of the user interface, text, etc.), - coding, as pointed out by other problems with the database is fairly comprehensive angle. Just dealing with "String externalization" is far from enough.

Some (software) languages ​​are better than others, helping developers write i18n code (which means code that will run on different locales), but it remains the responsibility of software development.

Answer 11

"I18N safe" encoding means a code that does not introduce I18N errors. I18N is the numerator of internationalization, where there are 18 characters between I and N.

There are several categories of problems related to i18n, such as: Culture format: Date Time format (DD / MM / YY in the UK and MM / DD / YY in the USA), number formats, Time zone, units of measurement vary from culture to culture. Data must be received, processed and displayed in the correct format for the correct culture / locale. International character support: All characters in all languages ​​must be received, processed and displayed correctly. Localizability: translatable strings should not be hard. They must be externalized in resource files.

"I18N Safe" coding means that none of the above problems are introduced by the way code is written.