Android plurals treatment of "zero"

Question

If have the following plural ressource in my strings.xml:

   <plurals name="item_shop">         <item quantity="zero">No item</item>         <item quantity="one">One item</item>         <item quantity="other">%d items</item>    </plurals>    

I'm showing the result to the user using:

textView.setText(getQuantityString(R.plurals.item_shop, quantity, quantity)); 

It's working well with 1 and above, but if quantity is 0 then I see "0 items". Is "zero" value supported only in Arabic language as the documentation seems to indicate? Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

The Android resource method of internationalisation is quite limited. I have had much better success using the standard java.text.MessageFormat.

Basically, all you have to do is use the standard string resource like this:

<resources>     <string name="item_shop">{0,choice,0#No items|1#One item|1&lt;{0} items}</string> </resources> 

Then, from the code all you have to do is the following:

String fmt = getResources().getText(R.string.item_shop).toString(); textView.setText(MessageFormat.format(fmt, amount)); 

You can read more about the format strings in the javadocs for MessageFormat