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[Bug localedata/10496] New: time representation in Arabian locales faulty?


Hi,

while doing some time formatting related testing, I noticed that using strftime
("%X", ...) yields the same formatted time string for e.g. both 6am and 6pm in
most Arabian locales (I noticed it with Arabian/Egypt, ar_EG), namely 'EET
06:00:00 ', which corresponds to t_fmt being '%Z %I:%M:%S ' (see "LANG=...
locale -k LC_TIME" or the source file localedata/locales/ar_EG and note the
trailing blank). The only exception I found is Arabian/Saudi Arabia (ar_SA)
where 6am and 6pm are formatted as " 6:00:00" and "18:00:00" respectively, i.e.
24 hours, single digit hours led by blanks instead of zeros (-> "%k:%M:%S").
I've found this with a glibc-2.10.1 runtime on Fedora 11 as well as in current
git code, but the current settings seem to have been made in 2000 (according to
git blame).

I don't speak Arabian, nor am I too familiar with Arabian culture, but I had a
pretty strong hunch that the people speaking Arabian would want to see a
difference between AM and PM times when formatted. That t_fmt for these locales
in glibc has a trailing blank (suggesting a copy and paste error) and that
according to comments in the files all locales I think are faulty have been
contributed by Kentaroh Noji <knoji@jp.ibm.com> and/or Tetsuji Orita
<orita@jp.ibm.com> (whom I simply presume not to be native Arabian speakers)
just adds to that hunch.

I've looked up a bunch of Arabian locales in the Common Locale Data
Repository[1][2] and found that all Arabian POSIX locales they carry have t_fmt
as "%I:%M:%S %p" (12 hours, with localized AM/PM string).

I'm not sure about ar_SA (where glibc uses 24 hours for time formats while CLDR
uses 12 hours), but IMO at least the other locales should be changed accordingly.

Thanks,
Nils

[1]: http://www.unicode.org/cldr/
[2]: http://unicode.org/cldr/data/posix/

-- 
           Summary: time representation in Arabian locales faulty?
           Product: glibc
           Version: unspecified
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: localedata
        AssignedTo: libc-locales at sources dot redhat dot com
        ReportedBy: nils at redhat dot com
                CC: drepper at redhat dot com,glibc-bugs at sources dot
                    redhat dot com,schwab at linux-m68k dot org


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10496

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