Most elegant way to deal with singles/plurals?

code-readability

Solution

Please use the `ngettext` function for things like this. It allows you to deal correctly with plurals in English and other languages, once and for all. You use it like this:

printf(ngettext("%d Comment", "%d Comments", $numComments), $numComments);

The `ngettext` function will return the first format string (`"%d Comment"`) if there is just a single comment and the second format string (`"%d Comments"`) if there are more. The `printf` function will then put the number into the string.

This might seem like a lot of work, but it is very powerful: it works with languages that have more than one plural form(!) -- they actually exist. The PHP manual gives an example for the word "window" which becomes "1 okno", "2 okna" and "5 oken" in some exotic language I don't recognize...

If you are consequent about using `ngettext`, then your future users from far-away countries will be very grateful to you :-)

Edit: As suggested in the comments, there is a single function to do the above:

function pluralize($num, $singleWord, $pluralWord) {
    return printf(ngettext($singleWord, $pluralWord, $num), $num);
}

By default, `xgettext` wont recognize this new function, but you can add it with the `--keyword` flag. Given a file `test.php` with

echo ngettext("foo", "foos", 1);
echo pluralize(2, "bar", "bars");

you can extract the strings with

xgettext --keyword=pluralize:2,3 test.php

The resulting `messages.po` file has entries like these:

#: test.php:7
msgid "foo"
msgid_plural "foos"
msgstr[0] ""
msgstr[1] ""

#: test.php:8
msgid "bar"
msgid_plural "bars"
msgstr[0] ""
msgstr[1] ""

The translator will fill in each plural form and with a correctly formed "Plural-Forms" line in the message catalog header, you will be able to support all languages.

Problem

Say you're making a blog software, and want to show the number of comments an entry got. You might do it this way: ``` [Entry title] [Content........] [ <?php print($numComments;) ?> Comments] ``` Which might result in: ``` [Entry title] [Content........] 5 Comments ``` But if an entry had only 1 comment, I want the line to say 'Comment' rather than 'Comments'. And in-line `if/else`s are ugly and repetitive. What's the best way to deal with this?

Original source