5 ARB and ICU edge cases developers should test in localization converters
A developer building a localization-file converter for Flutter projects discovered that passing basic parse checks does not guarantee a lossless or accurate conversion. Metadata entries prefixed with '@' in ARB files — which carry translator context and placeholder types — were silently dropped by an initial parser implementation. ICU plural messages posed a separate challenge, as a syntactically valid message can still be semantically wrong if it omits locale-specific plural categories required by languages like Russian or Arabic. Additional edge cases included exact numeric selectors being conflated with locale categories, deeply nested select-plural ICU structures breaking regex-based parsing, and improper handling of escape sequences and Unicode characters during serialization. The author now uses a dedicated set of test fixtures covering all five scenarios before trusting any converter output.
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