Web Tag short month format

[billy]

<#StormRainStart format="%d MMM"> produces "11 Apr." (at least today).

I don't want the full stop / period.

All other web tags with a date (that I use) produce the full stop when formatted with MMM - at least in my hands.

I can massage the output to get rid of it, but all documentation about MMM that I have read does not show a full stop in the example output. So what am I missing?

[HansR]

It's the locale setting which does that.
Either Mark has to remove those points consistently throughout CMX or you have to 'massage the output to get rid of it'.

This is an endless discussion about abbreviated month name which pops up whenever those documentation (without a point) is used against reality where a lot of locales do add a point (everybody but en-GB is seems). There are also many datafiles which have points in the name but they have been removed there about 2 years ago. If you want to access old data, you have to rename those datafiles without the point so apr.21log.txt should become apr21log.txt and note that it also depends on your locale whether the name starts with a capital or not (e.g. nl-NL has apr21log.txt but en-GB has Apr21log.txt

Choosing the month name based on the locale (and use the locale for many more things) ah well... that's life.

[sfws]

The original Wiki documentation at https://cumuluswiki.org/a/Webtags as created by David Jamieson and edited by Mark Crossley and Steve Loft, did make it clear that "MMM" would output the Short Month Format, and that was determined by Language settings for your locale.

When that was written, only the original Cumulus was available, and that ran only on Microsoft Windows. Working with Steve Loft, I did edit the page to cover his MX 3.0.0 beta. That was when I redesigned the big table to have separate columns for 1.9.4 and 3.0.0, plus a column for examples. I explicitly said they were British locale examples.

However, when Mark Crossley took over MX development, so much changed on web tags (both new tags and new parameters) that the page became a bit of a mess. . Mark (and others) did make a few amendments to the page to cover some new tags, but I gave up tracking the effects of release announcements in June 2020.

<#StormRainStart format="%d MMM"> produces "11 Apr." (at least today).

I don't want the full stop / period.

All other web tags with a date (that I use) produce the full stop when formatted with MMM - at least in my hands.

I can massage the output to get rid of it, but all documentation about MMM that I have read does not show a full stop in the example output. So what am I missing?

Some people will have noticed that after Ken True gave me administrative access to the Wiki, I have found some odd moments to make great strides in restructuring it, (hoping that will make it easier for others to update it). Two of my objectives were:
1) To start the separation of pages for MX and pages for legacy Cumulus, to make it easier for users who have interest in only one flavour
2) To break large pages up into smaller pages (by taking the text off line, and reorganising it, before pasting it back into Wiki)

It happens that I took the "webtags" page text offline a while ago, and have been restructuring it over recent months. The replacement 3 smaller pages ( I will leave readers to go and see the 3 replacement pages) have been recently pasted back into the Wiki. In terms of the new parameters page, the text that has now been pasted into place has a totally new, and hopefully much better layout, to explain all the parameters.

You will see Webtags/ parameters does explain the locale issues better, as a response to previous discussion in the forum on this issue, but it happens it has proved to be anticipating your question. EDIT: Updated link

[mcrossley]

As has been explained it is outside my control what is produced.

But if your rPi is dedicated to CMX, then you could consider changing your locale to one that is similar but does not use the short month names with periods.

If you switched from English Australian to English GB for instance, the currency symbols would be wrong (not a concern for CMX!), but every thing else would be pretty much the same I think? You could test it by running CMX with the language parameter... -lang en-GB

[billy]

well thanks to all three of you for your responses that clarify the issue(s) - there's nothing like a bit of history to put things into perspective!

I hadn't given any thought to the possibility that GB and AU would behave differently with respect to full stops terminating abbreviations. Although I was, I shouldn't have been be surprised - conventions are ever-changing and vary over short time frames and distances (eg Oxford vs Cambridge wrt "ize" and "ise"). I was just looking for a simple clean style and saw the full stop working against this without having any negative impact on readibility. Anyhow, I have learnt from developing my website that php is my friend - in this case functions substr() and strpos()

@sfws the link doesn't seem to work

You will see https://cumuluswiki.org/a/Web_Tag_Param ... th_formats does explain the locale issues better, as a response to previous discussion in the forum on this issue, but it happens it has proved to be anticipating your question.

[sfws]

php is my friend - in this case functions substr() and strpos()

Don't forget that strpos(haystack,needle, position) is more efficient than substr(haystack,needle,position, length) for use in any conditionals like looking for full stops.

@sfws the link doesn't seem to work

The link is in my earlier post works now.

I'm not the Wiki (or indeed general computing) expert that some people seem to believe.
I tried to make my new parameter page, appear as a sub-page of the main webtags page.
By using hierarchy, in the same way that Editing appears as a sub-page of Help:Contents

Freddie - Is my page naming still wrong in the Wiki? If it needs correction, then there are various links to update (one on "main page" of wiki and multiple links in "Webtags" page, as well as now twice in this thread).

[freddie]

Freddie - Is my page naming still wrong in the Wiki? If it needs correction, then there are various links to update (one on "main page" of wiki and multiple links in "Webtags" page, as well as now twice in this thread).

I don't know, as I'm not a Wiki expert either. Following your link, I get a message that the page has been deleted and there is no redirect to forward the user to. Perhaps ask the owner of the Wiki? I forget his username just now.