What if a field title ends with a question mark?

I know this one has been bothering Matt for a long time. He's even submitted a core patch for it. But nothing has gotten in yet due to translation problems.

However I ran into this problem again while putting together our new contact form (using the amazing Webform Module). I decided to solve it in our theme and thought others might want to use this trick.

By copying the theme_form_element() function from the theme.inc and pasting it into our template.php file, we can do a little checking to see if the form element title ends with a punctuation character. And if so, suppress the trailing colon.

Here's what it looks like for Drupal 4.7. I'm guessing it'll be pretty similar, if not completely the same for Drupal 5:

  
/**
 * Rewrite of theme_form_element() to suppress ":" if the title ends with a punctuation mark.
 */
function phptemplate_form_element($title, $value, $description = NULL, $id = NULL, $required = FALSE, $error = FALSE) { 

  $output  = '
'."\n"; 
  $required = $required ? '*' : ''; 

  if ($title) { 
    // I've added the next two lines
    $punctuation = array(',', '.', '?', '!', ':');
    $colon = in_array($title[strlen($title)-1], $punctuation) ? '' : ':';
    if ($id) {
      // I've modified this next bit
      $output .= ' '
        . t('%title%colon %required', array('%title' => $title, '%required' => $required, '%colon' => $colon))
        . "\n";
    } 
    else { 
      // and this one too
      $output .= ' '
        . t('%title%colon %required', array('%title' => $title, '%required' => $required, '%colon' => $colon))
        . "\n"; 
    } 
  } 

  $output .= " $value\n"; 

  if ($description) { 
    $output .= ' 
'. $description ."
\n"; 
  } 

  $output .= "
\n"; 

  return $output; 
}
  

Sorry about the weird output. Some of the lines are a bit long.