I am running openhabian 1.4 with habpanel in a german environment.
The wind direction of wunderground is stored in my mariaDB persistence as E, NE, SSW, etc.
In my German Habpanel GUI i get Ost, Nord-Ost, … so no abbreviation.
my habpanel widget looks like:
Not completely sure what your question is, but check
itemState(itemname, [ignoreTransform]): retrieves the state of an item by its name; ignoreTransform (optional, false by default) will return the raw state (e.g. ‘CLOSED’) instead of the transformed state (‘zu’);