Form element labels should not show a : if the label ends in a '?' [#24482]

Not sure if this goes under theme system or other.

When fields end in a '?', the theme_form_element function shows a label like this "Label?:" which looks weird. I added a patch to check if it ends in a question mark, and if so, don't add the colon to the label.

I know this function is themeable so I could've done it there, but I feel this should be the default behavior for all those fields like "Are you a smoker?", "Add to front page?", etc.

Comment	File	Size	Author
	patch_no_colon_after_question_mark.patch	710 bytes	RobRoy

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Comments

Comment #1

Steven CreditAttribution: Steven commented 7 June 2005 at 19:12

This patch isn't very flexible as it only deals with question marks, and ASCII ones at that. A better solution would be one that checks for any punctuation at the end (character class Po), but then we'd get people complaining about their PCRE not supporting Unicode again.

Still, I can't think of any situation inside Drupal where we have a question mark at the end of a label. It is not something I'd advise in any case. Instead of "Are you a smoker?" we tend to have a checkbox "I am a smoker.".

As it is a themable function, I'm leaning towards not committing it.

About the actual code, I think substr($label, -1) would be a more readable version of selecting the last byte.

Comment #2

drumm

he/him

NY, US

CreditAttribution: drumm commented 7 June 2005 at 19:27

I think any change like this should come with guidelines for usage. In English we can have form labels end in ':', '?', or nothing. When is the use of each appropriate? I think the current ':'-only code is good in that it provides consistency. I suspect that any label ending in '?' can be effectively rephrased. I'm not much of an expert on interface element labeling, but I think these issues should be considered.

And this change would need to be implemented on more form elements than text fields.

Comment #3

RobRoy CreditAttribution: RobRoy commented 7 June 2005 at 19:27

Yeah, it's not such a big deal. I guess as my case is pretty unique, using a themed function would be the way to go. Thanks anyways.

Comment #4

chx CreditAttribution: chx commented 7 June 2005 at 19:41

On a side: yesterday hell froze over, Apple went to Intel and what's important to us, Debian sarge became stable. So, no more whining about PCRE -- now can tell everyone (rightly) that anything before 4.3.3 is ancient, and even Debian sports 4.3.10 so...