Ruby on Rails is/are pluralisation

Question

Is there a helper to avoid this sort of code?

= @leads.length == 1 ? 'is' : 'are'

I know about pluralize but it doesn't help in this case. I know that writing a helper would be trivial, I want to know if there's something in the Rails API that I have overlooked.

Thanks,

-Tim

Answer 1

As t6d said you need to add is/are to the Rails inflector. Just the code from td6, but you need to add the ActiveSupport namespace:

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflection|
  inflection.irregular "is", "are"
end

Now the helper Rails has built in is pluralize, but in a view that won't do what you want. For example:

pluralize(@leads.length,'is')

outputs (for 2 leads)

2 are

For what you want you need to make your own helper that will pluralize the word, but not output the count. So if you base it on the current rails pluralize:

def pluralize_no_count(count, singular, plural = nil)
  ((count == 1 || count == '1') ? singular : (plural || singular.pluralize))
end

Answer 2

In conclusion I'll go for:

Config

# inflections.rb
Inflector.inflections do |inflection|
  inflection.irregular "is", "are"
  inflection.irregular "has", "have"
end

Rails 3

"#{subject} #{'is'.pluralize(count)} working!"

Rails 2

# application_helper.rb
def signularize_or_pluralize(word, count)
  if count.to_i == 1
    word.singularize
  else
    word.pluralize
  end
end

# in the view view
"#{subject} #{signularize_or_pluralize('is', count)} working!"

Answer 3

Maybe you could use pluralize and add a inflection for 'is'

Inflector.inflections do |inflection|
  inflection.irregular "is", "are"
end

so that

'is'.pluralize # => 'are'

(I didn't test the solution, but it should work.)