Bug 13414

Forwarded from https://launchpad.net/bugs/887395:

In the locales package, the file en_ZA (for South Africa) gives a dot '.' as decimal point. However, the Qt library gives a comma ',' as decimal point. This creates problems when a Qt program is trying to communicate with a non Qt program since the decimal point is not the same, numbers are not correctly recognized.

After doing some searching, Qt (see http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/QtLocales) takes its locale information from cldr.unicode.org:
http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/browser/tags/release-2-0-1/posix/en_ZA.UTF-8.src

This page gives a comma as decimal separator. So does Wikipedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark - note that a footnote seems to indicate that this may be a recent official decision).

Having 2 different definitions for the decimal point on the same system can only lead to problems.

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http://www.gcis.gov.za/resource_centre/guidelines/styleguide/editorial_styleguide_2011.pdf is an official document which says to use the comma.