The i18n Cookbook - recipies for a global society

Problem:

You want to use the correct forms for plurals in a sentence including dynamic values.

Solution:

Plurals can be very difficult to deal with.  It is not always as easy as adding an s to the end of a word.  Consider the sentence, "Enter your child(rens)'s names(s)."  That looks pretty ugly, and not human at all.

ChoiceFormat allows us to spcify blocks of text that appear depending upon a numeric value passed in.  For example:

//Create a collection of options separated by pipes, and preceded by numeric markers.
String msg = "0#no dogs| 1#a dog| 2#a couple dogs| 3#several dogs| 3<many dogs";
ChoiceFormat fmt = new ChoiceFormat(msg);
//Pass a choice into the format and that option will be selected.
System.out.println("I have " + fmt.format(2) + ".");

Now obviously our hard coded sentence in the previous example is not a good thing for localization.  We can combine a MessageFormat and ChoiceFormat to solve that issue and give us an easily localizable solution.

//Create an array of arguments.  In this case a ChoiceFormat array
Format[] choices = {new ChoiceFormat("0#no dogs| 1#a dog| 2#a couple dogs| 3#several dogs| 3<many dogs")};
//Create a message format with the type of choice
String msg = "I have {0,choice}.";
MessageFormat mft = new MessageFormat(msg);
//call the setFormats method on the MessageFormat and pass the ChoiceFormat array in
mft.setFormats(choices);
for(int x =0; x < 5; x++){
       Object[] args = {x};
        System.out.println(mft.format(args));
}