Plurality in user messages

Question

Many times, when generating messages to show to the user, the message will contain a number of something that I want to inform the customer about.

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Answer 1

The first thing I'd suggest is: use string.Format. That allows you to do something like this:

int numOfItems = GetNumOfItems();
string msgTemplate;
msgTemplate = numOfItems == 1 ? "You selected only {0} item." : "Wow, you selected {0} items!";
string msg = string.Format(msgTemplate, numOfItems);

Further, in WPF apps, I've seen systems where a resource string would be pipe-delimited to have two messages: a singular and a plural message (or a zero/single/many message, even). A custom converter could then be used to parse this resource and use the relevant (formatted) string, so your Xaml is something like this: