This code (with the change of this "krazy fix", without any detail in the commit message on the actual issue) is simply wrong: never ever use the UI text for anything else than showing it to the user. As also the comment says, accelerators can be added to it, for example.
A proper solution is to store the real data in some other form, for example a custom role in a model, a custom property in a QObject, an external QHash, etc.