rails singularize to a / an

Question

Is there a method that works similar to singularize to prepend "a" or "an according to the word?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

5

If you need something simpler, something that will for instance prepend "an" if a word starts with vowel, you can use my one liner:

String.class_eval { def prepend; %w(a e i o u).include?(downcase.first) ? "an #{self}" : "a #{self}"; end }

Put this in a file prepend.rb in config/initializers folder of your application.

Then you will be able to use

"carrot".prepend => "a carrot"
"apple".prepend => "an apple"

edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

Community

answered Nov 19 '11 at 14:03

shime

3

I like it. I would humbly suggest using a_or_an for the name. prepend is wonderfully generic but perhaps too much so. carrot.a_or_an is going to be pretty clear to casual code readers :) If we are talking about others things like 'This' or somethings sure, but for now KISS :) – Michael Durrant Nov 19 '11 at 16:18
Great solution! However, I called my function "with_article". Cheers! – vanboom Oct 29 '13 at 15:35
It will fail when it comes to a string like `hour` which do not start with vowel. – Shailesh Kalamkar Jun 30 '16 at 17:30
Similarly, it will fail for some words that start with one of those 5 letters but take "a", like `university`. – Masa Sakano Mar 07 '18 at 15:12

1 Answers1