Definition of Zero Digit in format-number()

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

Hello again, everyone,

This is the second of the two issues I wanted to raise about format-number().

Attached below is a post to the XSL list following a discussion where I 
claimed there was unsupportive text in the 1.0 Recommendation to allow any 
arbitrary character as a zero digit.

All it says is:

  - zero-digit specifies the character used as the digit zero; the default 
value is the digit zero (0)

Tony brought up that there were a number of zero-digits of differing 
languages that are specified in Unicode, all of which would be meaningful 
in this case.

But does it make sense for an implementation to accept *any* character as a 
zero digit?  Is it therefore assumed subsequent digits are each just one 
position away from the next in the character code table?

I can see there is nothing explicitly disallowing anything, but does that 
implicitly allow anything?  I'm willing to accept the answer is "yes", but 
I really am unsure.

What say you?

.............. Ken


Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 08:43:17 -0500
To: xsl-list@mulberrytech.com
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: zero-digit

At 8:03 PM -0500 11/30/00, G. Ken Holman wrote:
 > Because of the leading paragraph, I never interpreted
 > the attributes to mean anything other than the format
 > pattern ... what indication did you have that these
 > attributes were germane elsewhere?

James Clark just told me that changing the zero digit will indeed change 
the 1 digit, 2 digit, and so on. This is not very well documented in either 
Java or XSLT, but it is indeed the expected behavior. For example, setting 
the zero-digit to A would set

1 to B
2 to C
3 to D
4 to E
5 to F
6 to G
7 to H
8 to I
9 to J


--
G. Ken Holman                      mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
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