The 'Deppenapostroph'

[GIGALinux]

We are in Germany have a discussion about the "Deppenapostroph" (greengrocer's apostrophe). BuddyPress makes the same mistake , like here: http://buddypress.org/developers/gigalinux/ (Dennis's Friends). I don't known how the grammer rules for this case are, but this function is optimized for the German grammer rules: ​http://toscho.de/2009/php-funktion-genitiv/. Maybe it helps.

[plrk]

This is a very complicated problem. In Swedish, the "possessive case" is indicated by the suffix "s" - similar to English, but without the apostrophe ('s).

If "Linus" owned a ball in English, we'd say "Linus' ball". However, as the ticket above explains, BuddyPress simply applies the possessive case without checking if "Linus" ends with an s and then prints "Linus's ball".

This could be fixed pretty easily by a function like the one linked above - check for an ending s, if one exists, apply only the apostrophe and not the s.

The problem comes with how to apply the translation functions. For Swedish (and German) it is pretty straightforward - I'd just translate "'" to "" and "'s" to "s" - but what about languages that do not have similar grammatical rules?

[DJPaul]

I'd suggest BP just doesn't try to solve this problem - it's a nightmare.

[boonebgorges]

This is language-specific. In English, the question of the greengrocer's apostrophe is one of house style.

In any case, I don't think we create this kind of string programatically anymore in BuddyPress. Everything is passed through a language file, and translators are welcome to do whatever is appropriate for their locale.