Clever way to append 's' for plural form in .Net (syntactic sugar)

Question

I want to be able to type something like:

Console.WriteLine(\"You have {0:life/lives} left.\", player.Lives);

instead of

Consol         


        

Answer 1

A bit late to the party, but I wrote a library called MessageFormat.NET that handles this.

var str = @"You have {lives, plural, 
                     zero {no lives} 
                      one {one life} 
                    other {# lives}
            } left.";
var result = MessageFormatter.Format(str, new {
    lives = 1337
});

The whitespace in the string surrounding the text is not required, but merely for readability.

This is great when translating, as languages have different rules when it comes to pluralization.