Translator comments showing up incorrectly for certain cases

[Otto42]

Example (non-specific to 5.0, although it only started showing up after the 5.0 release):

​https://build.trac.wordpress.org/browser/branches/5.0/wp-includes/class-wp-locale.php?marks=167#L167

​https://build.trac.wordpress.org/browser/branches/5.0/wp-includes/class-wp-locale.php?marks=195#L195

The first one has this line, which works fine.

$this->month['12'] = /* translators: month name */ __( 'December' );

The second one has this:

$this->month_abbrev[ __( 'December' ) ]  = /* translators: three-letter abbreviation of the month */ _x( 'Dec', 'December abbreviation' );

Now, this may be in the build tools, or in recent changes to glotpress, but in the translate site, this particular entry for "December" ends up showing up with this comment:

Comment: translators: month name translators: three-letter abbreviation of the month

Now, this is obviously confusing. In at least two cases, UK and IT, the translators ended up translating it as the abbreviation. This lead to users having their date displays suddenly change from full months to abbreviated months.

​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp-5-does-not-recognize-the-date-format-l-j-f-y/

Changing the translations back fixes the problem, but this file should probably be better organized to make sure that the translator comment goes onto the correct string, or the build tools should be modified to make the same happen.

[ocean90]

This is a known issue and tracked in ​https://github.com/wp-cli/i18n-command/issues/96.

[garrett-eclipse]

@ocean90 thanks for the reference I was just taking a look at this.

I'm curious if in core we add a comment specific to the first string on the line if the parser would associate the two strings properly? If so I can put a patch in for 5.0.x to address the issue in core.

Current string;
$this->month_abbrev[ __( 'December' ) ] = /* translators: three-letter abbreviation of the month */ _x( 'Dec', 'December abbreviation' );

Suggestion;
$this->month_abbrev[ /* translators: month name */ __( 'December' ) ] = /* translators: three-letter abbreviation of the month */ _x( 'Dec', 'December abbreviation' );

Let me know if that mitigates the upstream issue and I'll put a patch together.

Thanks