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:

Problem:

You want to combine dynamic values with your static resource files.

Solution:

There are many situations where part of a sentence comes from a dynamic source, or is provided by the user.  Obviously translatng a sentence for every possible scenario is not an option.  Thankfully Java provides a solution for this situation.  It is called MessageFormat.

A message format is a way of replacing variables in a sentence in a locale sensitive manner.

A simple message format: