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

Internationalization

I assume you want internationalization support, in which case different languages have different patterns for plurals (e.g. a special plural form for 2 of something, or more complicated languages like Polish), and you can't rely on applying some simple pattern to your string to fix it.

You can use GNU Gettext's ngettext function and provide two English messages in your source code. Gettext will provide the infrastructure to choose from other (potentially more) messages when translated into other languages. See http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/Plural-forms.html for a full description of GNU gettext's plural support.

GNU Gettext is under the LGPL. ngettext is named GettextResourceManager.GetPluralString in the C# port of Gettext.

(If you don't need localization support, and don't want to use Gettext right away, then write your own function that does this for English, and pass two full messages to it, that way if you need l10n later, you can add by rewriting a single function.)