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.

I\'ll give a

Answer 1

To be able to have pluralized messages which will be possible to localize properly, my opinion is that it would be wise to first create a layer of indirection between the number and a message.

For example, use a constant of some sort to specify which message you want to display. Fetch the message using some function that will hide the implementation details.

get_message(DELETE_WARNING, quantity)

Next, create a dictionary that holds the possible messages and variations, and make variations know when they should be used.

DELETE_WARNING = {
   1: 'Are you sure you want to delete %s item',
   >1: 'Are you sure you want to delete %s items'
   >5: 'My language has special plural above five, do you wish to delete it?'
}

Now you could simply find the key that corresponds to the quantity and interpolate the value of the quantity with that message.

This oversimplified and naive example, but I don't really see any other sane way to do this and be able to provide good support for L10N and I18N.