Struts2 is a framework for web application development in Java. It’s considered mature and feature-rich and inherits the internationalization (i18n) capabilities of the Java platform. This is what you would expect. In fact, the i18n features of Struts2 are more powerful than the platform ones, but the power comes with a price.
Examples of the sunshine path
If you read a book like “Struts 2 in Action” written by Donald Brown and others, you’ll come across a chapter named “Understanding internationalization” (it’s chapter 11). You’ll get a great overview with a real-world example of what is possible (placeholder expansion, for example) and if you read a bit further, there is a word of warning:
“You might also want to further investigate the MessageFormat class of the Java platform. We saw its fundamentals in this chapter when we learned of the native Java support for parameterization of message texts and the autoformatting of date and numbers. As we indicated earlier, the MessageFormat class is much richer than we’ve had the time to demonstrate. We recommend consulting the Java documentation if you have further formatting needs as well. “
If you postpone this warning, you’re doomed. It’s not the fault of the book that their examples are the sunshine case (the best circumstances that might happen). The book tries to teach you the basics of Struts2, not its pitfalls.
A pitfall of Struts2 I18N
You will write a web application in Struts2, using the powerful built-in i18n, just to discover that some entries aren’t printed right. Let’s have an example i18n entry:
impossible.action.message=You can't do this
If you include this entry in a webpage using Struts2 i18n tags, you’ll find the apostrophe (unicode character \u0027) missing:
You cant do this
What happened? You didn’t read all about MessageFormat. The apostrophe is a special character for the MessageFormat parser, indicating regions of non-interpreted text (Quoted Strings). As there is only one apostrophe in our example, it just gets omitted and ignored. If there were two of them, both would be omitted and all expansion effort between them would be ceased.
How to overcome the pitfall
You’ll need to escape the apostrophe to have it show up. Here’s the paragraph of the MessageFormat APIDoc:
Within a String,
"''"represents a single quote. A QuotedString can contain arbitrary characters except single quotes; the surrounding single quotes are removed. An UnquotedString can contain arbitrary characters except single quotes and left curly brackets. Thus, a string that should result in the formatted message “‘{0}'” can be written as"'''{'0}''"or"'''{0}'''".
That’s bad news. You have to tell your translators to double-type their apostrophes, else they won’t show up. But only the ones represented by \u0027, not the specialized ones of the higher unicode regions like “grave accent” or “acute accent”. If you already have a large amount of translations, you need to check every apostrophe if it was meant to be printed or to control the MessageFormat parser.
The underlying principle
This unexpected behaviour of an otherwise powerful functionality is a common sign of a principle I call “stacked smartness doesn’t add up”. I will blog about the principle in the near future, so here’s just a short description: A powerful (smart) behaviour makes sense in the original use case, but when (re-)used in another layer of functionality, it becomes a burden, because strange side-effects need to be taken care of.
Schneide Blog 