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

My general approach is to write a "single/plural function", like this:

public static string noun(int n, string single, string plural)
{
  if (n==1)
    return single;
  else
    return plural;
}

Then in the body of the message I call this function:

string message="Congratulations! You have won "+n+" "+noun(n, "foobar", "foobars")+"!";

This isn't a whole lot better, but at least it, (a) puts the decision in a function and so unclutters the code a little, and (b) is flexible enough to handle irregular plurals. i.e. it's easy enough to say noun(n, "child", "children") and the like.

Of course this only works for English, but the concept is readily extensible to languages with more complex endings.

It occurs to me that you could make the last parameter optional for the easy case:

public static string noun(int n, string single, string plural=null)
{
  if (n==1)
    return single;
  else if (plural==null)
    return single+"s";
  else
    return plural;
}