[gen-l10n] Escaping curly braces without use-escaping #122404
Description
Hello! We have a very big Flutter project and we use a translation management service for all our terms and languages. After upgrading from Flutter 3.3 to 3.7 some of our terms started to fail on parse. Below is the minimum example for that:
➜ arb_curly_brace_escape flutter --version
Flutter 3.7.6 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision 12cb4eb7a0 (9 days ago) • 2023-03-01 10:29:26 -0800
Engine • revision ada363ee93
Tools • Dart 2.19.3 • DevTools 2.20.1
➜ arb_curly_brace_escape cat lib/l10n/app_en.arb
{
"test": "You shouldn't use those characters: { } in this field"
}
➜ arb_curly_brace_escape flutter gen-l10n
Because l10n.yaml exists, the options defined there will be used instead.
To use the command line arguments, delete the l10n.yaml file in the Flutter project.
[app_en.arb:test] ICU Syntax Error: Expected "identifier" but found "}".
You shouldn't use those characters: { } in this field
^
Found syntax errors.
Right now we cannot use curly braces in our terms literally, without being parsed as placeholders.
There is the use-escaping param in l10n.yaml, but this requires changing almost every term where a ' character is used and educating (which won't always work so there's additional QA needed) our translators to escape single quotes.
For us, that is a major regression.
IMO, if a term uses the {placeholder} syntax, but has no placeholder in its @termName.placeholders defined, it shouldn't be treated and parsed (and thus fail to do so) as a placeholder. But that's just one of the solutions.