WordPress
I18n: Report the translatable strings with leading and trailing spaces
Is your feature request related to a problem?
At translate.w.org, sometimes we get translations that start or end with one or more empty spaces, and we want to avoid this. We have added some flags to GlotPress to show them, but ideally they should not appear in the English strings (the strings to be translated), as it is indicated in the “Best practices” of How to Internationalize Your Plugin: Do not leave leading or trailing whitespace in a translatable phrase.
Some examples of incorrect strings in the translation system: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Describe the solution you'd like
When a user will execute phpcs, I would like to see these errors, with an option to resolve them with phpcbf.
FILE: /Users/my-user/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/my-plugin/index.php
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FOUND 2 ERRORS AFFECTING 2 LINES
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1 | ERROR | [x] The translatable string can't start with one or more empty spaces
2 | ERROR | [x] The translatable string can't end with one or more empty spaces
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PHPCBF CAN FIX THE 2 MARKED SNIFF VIOLATIONS AUTOMATICALLY
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Additional context (optional)
- [x] I intend to create a pull request to implement this feature.
Sounds like a reasonable request and not that hard to implement.
This should, however, NOT be auto-fixable as there may be consequences to removing the space(s) in how the text is displayed, i.e. a space may need to be added in a hard-coded, non-translatable string elsewhere to mitigate the space removal and WPCS will not be able to determine that or to make the extra fix which is needed, which would leave the application is a broken state if WPCS would auto-fix.
