Date Popup - Problem with number of chars allowed for month name

I am also building a bilingual FR / EN site, and experiencing the same problem, with the latest version (6.x-2.3, July 29).

However, the problem doesn't seem restricted to August or any other month in particular.

Besides, the month names in the editing field are not translated, so we're having [26 May 2009] instead of [26 mai 2009], when using the French interface, with strings properly translated.

Submitting or editing an article using the French interface is impossible. I'm changing the priority order to "critical" since it is a very, very annoying bug.

After taking a closer look at the problem, it seems that all month abbreviations that don't fit in the 3 character mold will prevent the user from submitting his post.

I temporarily fixed the French translation strings so that :

!month-abbreviation |Jan|Fév|Mar|Avr|Mai|Juin|Juil|Août|Sep|Oct|Nov|Déc (4-letter summer month abbreviations)

becomes

!month-abbreviation |Jan|Fév|Mar|Avr|Mai|Jun|Jul|Aoû|Sep|Oct|Nov|Déc

+++

However, in French and some other languages, some month names cannot be shortened to 3 chars without looking weird,

My opinion is that the need to save space is not so great here. The date form shouldn't restrict the month name to 3 chars, and should rather display the full-length name.

Is this still valid with the most recent release?

No activity after 2+ months of being set to postponed (maintainer needs more info).
Assuming fixed.

the bug is still active. See this duplicate post http://drupal.org/node/1126738

this is a problem with the french translation of the english abbreviation "Aug". the string "Aug" is correctly translated as "aoû" on localize.drupal.org[1] but the string "!month-abbreviation |Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec" is translated as "!month-abbreviation |Jan|Fév|Mar|Avr|Mai|Juin|Juil|Août|Sep|Oct|Nov|Déc" [2]. while it's true that french speakers rarely abbreviate the word "août" as "aoû" using four characters here breaks the rule that the date format 'M' should be a three-letter abbreviation of the month name as per php's date() function.

this matters because date_api parses dates using date_format_patterns() to generate a series of regular expressions to match custom date formats. the format 'j M Y' will be parsed with pcre_match() using the regular expression '(\d{1,2}) (\S{3,4}) (\d{4})'. however, the string "août" actually contains five bytes in the character set UTF-8, meaning it will fail. "fév", "juin", and "juil" will match because they contain four bytes each. the regular expression allows for four bytes to account for three-letter month names with accents but "août" is still too long.

the solution is to go to admin/build/translate/search and make sure "Aug" is translated as "aoû" everywhere. if you really want to use "août" you would have to hack date_api.module to change 'M' => '\S{3,4}' to 'M' => '\S{3,5}' but then the date parsing wouldn't do what the format says it should do, so i'm not going to submit a patch (and i doubt the module maintainers would accept it anyways).

note that date popups will also not be translated correctly without #975320: Date picker not translated. this will incorporate the translations bundled with jquery ui (37 languages as of version 1.6). to add other languages, a patch should be submitted upstream to the jquery ui maintainers.

@mvc: Translation corrected. Thanks for the feedback!

@mvc: I still have this problem with the 7.x-2.9 module... Do you think that some solution will come one day or should we use your suggestion of translation to "aoû". But then I think that hundred thousand French people will likely not appreciate it.

Strange that this has a so long and painful history and that the module maintainer does not consider it...