Entity Language Type is incorrect

[EdJoPaTo]

• wikibase-sdk version: 9.0.5
• Environment: 19.7.0

Currently the Entity Type for labels, description, aliases and so on is Record<WmLanguageCode, …>. WmLanguageCode is only de but not something like de-ch which is also there.

Not sure how to model all the possible variations there or just to use string or type LanguageCode = string to help with code reading?

[EdJoPaTo]

Maybe something like this?

/** Language code like de, en, fr but not de-ch */
type WmLanguageCode = typeof languages[number] // generated by script
/** Language variant like de-ch */
type WmLanguageVariant = string // not sure if that's something possible to be scripted

/** Language codes and language variants like de, de-ch, en, fr */
type WmLanguage = WmLanguageCode | WmLanguageVariant // something | string will be simplified to be string currently but its still better to use internally to understand what kind of string it is

Interestingly there is shortLang which splits at _ and not - which is used on labels, descriptions and so on. So probably both cases exist. Should be care about that or should we just use one type for both?

wikibase-sdk/src/utils/utils.ts

Lines 3 to 7 in 2f62520

	/** Example: keep only 'fr' in 'fr_FR' */
	export function shortLang (language: string): WmLanguageCode {
	const lang = language.toLowerCase().split('_')[0] as WmLanguageCode
	return lang
	}