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

How about a more generic way. Avoid pluralization in the second sentence:

Number of selected items to be deleted: noofitemsselected.
Are you sure?

I find out that doing it this way puts the number at the end of the line which is really easy to spot. This solution would work with the same logic in any language.

Answer 2

It gets a little bit shorter with

string message = "Are you sure you want to delete " + noofitemsselected + " item" + (noofitemsselected>1 ? "s" : "") + "?";

Answer 3

How about just:

string message = "Are you sure you want to delete " + noofitemsselected + " item(s)?"

That way, you eliminate the number agreement difficulties, and end up with an even shorter, more to-the-point error message for the user as a bonus. We all know users don't read error messages anyway. The shorter they are, the more likely they are to at least glance at the text.

Or, armed with this knowledge that users don't read error messages, you could approach this a different way. Skip the confirmation message altogether, and just provide an undo feature that Just Works, regardless of what was deleted. Most users are already accustomed to undoing an operation when they notice it was not what they wanted, and are likely to find this behavior more natural than having to deal with another annoying pop-up.

Answer 4

You could generate the plural automatically, see eg. plural generator.

For plural generating rules see wikipedia

string msg = "Do you want to delete " + numItems + GetPlural(" item", numItems) + "?";

Answer 5

One approach I haven't seen mentioned would be the use of a substitution/select tag (e.g. something like "You are about to squash {0} [?i({0}=1):/cactus/cacti/]". (in other words, have a format-like expression specify the substitution based upon whether argument zero, taken as an integer, equals 1). I've seen such tags used in the days before .net; I'm not aware of any standard for them in .net, nor do I know the best way to format them.

Answer 6

Why would you want to present a message the users can actually understand? It goes against 40 years of programing history. Nooooo, we have a good thing going on, don't spoil it with understandable messages.

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(j/k)