rails4 // pluralize do pluralize when count is at 0

Question

I have a big problem with pluralize : when 0, it does pluralize the word

pluralize(@posts.size,"post")

if @posts.size equals 0 :

0 posts

if @posts.size equals 1 :

1 post

if @posts.size equals 2 or more :

n posts

As it should not add an s when 0 by default, I'm lost. Is there anyone seeing what's wrong right here ?

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:38

Any number not 1 is considered plural. Instead of saying:

You have 0 posts.

the correct English sentence would be:

You do not have any posts.

Take a look at here and here.

Edit: Your request is fairly large and may not be possible for anyone (atleast for me) to succinctly put it in a single post. I would rather suggest you read through Internationalization (popularly called i18n) doc.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html

Basically, there are 2 things, Translations and Inflectors.

Inflectors are rules defining how a string or a pattern substitutes into singular or plural or if it's uncountable. Example, plural for is is are is defined as an inflector.

I18n helps you define locale specified humanized text for a string. If you see in your Rails project, inside config folder, you will see a folder called locales, which contains single YAML file for each locale. Such humanized text for locales are called translations.

pluralize is a function that is defined at 3 places:

Inside Inflector module.
As a String's instance method.
As a Helper method inside ActionView.

Usually in Rails, we call the helper method, which may make a call to String's method which in turns calls the Inflector's method.

You try adding following code inside config/initializers/filename.rb and trying running again:

module ActionView
  module Helpers
    module TextHelper
      def pluralize(count, singular, plural = nil)
        "#{count || 0} " + ([0, 1, '0', '1'].include?(count) ? singular : (plural || singular.pluralize))
      end
    end
  end
end

This will return 0 post but for the default locale only which is en. If you wish to do it for a specific locale, call the String pluralize function with selected locale and pass it to above function as 3 argument. Example, for fr locale, you may try something like:

pluralize 0, "post", "post".pluralize(:fr) # => will return for fr locale

Ask more questions here at SO and let experts explain in more detail.

Hope this helps you.

my bad. But am french, and we do not pluralize when zero. How to handle it ? — Ben, Oct 30 '14 at 17:02
Do you want to do it only for French locale or for all locales, including English? — Harsh Gupta, Oct 30 '14 at 21:19
Well; if you could teach me how to handle it all; I guess it'd be perfect ! — Ben, Oct 30 '14 at 22:46
@Ben You are not alone, as a non-native English speaker I also thought this way which is annoying at first but I get over it now. — newguy, Apr 28 '16 at 03:58
In the end how can we tell `pluralize` to add no s when called with 0? `pluralize('document', 0) // 0 document` with `config.i18n.default_locale = :fr`? Only by extending `TextHelper`? Doesn't feel very clean... — Augustin Riedinger, Nov 23 '17 at 13:37

cercxtrova · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-17T08:19:58.380

I use another method for this :

In my view:

= t('counts.offers', count: project.nb_offers)
# t() is a shortcut for I18n.translate

The first parameter is the path in your file locale file, the second is the thing you want to count.

Then, in your config/locales/xx.yml (fr in my case):

fr:
  counts:
    offers:
      zero: 0 offre
      one: 1 offre
      other: "%{count} offres"

So I don't have to create a new config file, simply use locales

rails4 // pluralize do pluralize when count is at 0

2 Answers2