I18N translate "." or "%" causes a full array of ALL translations

Question

I am having an issue in my Rails app of translation using I18n. I create dynamic sentences in arrays like this [:this_is_a, 5, :which_is_a_number, "."] for which I translate each word one by one.

When I iterate through this and translate I18n.t(".") I get the full array of all translations in my entire app which outputs a 1000+ array text. This also seem to be true for I18n.t("%").

Is there a setting that stops this from happening? My only hack solution for this at the moment is to change all "." to " . " but I am hoping there is a better solution. Any advice?

Answer 1

"." is used for namespacing translation keys. If you have file like this:

module1:
  key_a: "Module1 Translation A"
  key_b: "Module1 Translation B"
module2:
  key_a: "Module2 Translation A"

Then you access those with "."

I18n.t("module1.key_a")
I18n.t("module2.key_a")

If you just use I18n.t(".") it will give whole top-level namespace. You can change this behavior by changing separator

I18n.t("module1@key_a", separator: "@")

Just choose some character that you know won't appear as token.

"%" character is used for interpolation:

module1:
  name: "My name is %{name}"

And then

I18n.t("module1.name", name: "John")

It doesn't look like you can change "%" to something else because it is hardcoded. But it should not return the whole array of translation. It should just return "translation missing" error. At least that is what I have on my version of I18n gem.