Clever way to append 's' for plural form in .Net (syntactic sugar)

Question

I want to be able to type something like:

Console.WriteLine("You have {0:life/lives} left.", player.Lives);

instead of

Console.WriteLine("You have {0} {1} left.", player.Lives, player.Lives == 1 ? "life" : "lives");

so that for player.Lives == 1 the output would be: You have 1 life left.
for player.Lives != 1 : You have 5 lives left.

or

Console.WriteLine("{0:day[s]} till doomsday.", tillDoomsdayTimeSpan);

Some systems have that built-in. How close can I get to that notation in C#?

EDIT: Yes, I am specifically looking for syntactic sugar, and not a method to determine what singular/plural forms are.

Answer 1

You may checkout the PluralizationService class which is part of the .NET 4.0 framework:

string lives = "life";
if (player.Lives != 1)
{
    lives = PluralizationService
        .CreateService(new CultureInfo("en-US"))
        .Pluralize(lives);
}
Console.WriteLine("You have {0} {1} left", player.Lives, lives);

It is worth noting that only English is supported for the moment. Warning, this don't work on the Net Framework 4.0 Client Profile!

You could also write an extension method:

public static string Pluralize(this string value, int count)
{
    if (count == 1)
    {
        return value;
    }
    return PluralizationService
        .CreateService(new CultureInfo("en-US"))
        .Pluralize(value);
}

And then:

Console.WriteLine(
    "You have {0} {1} left", player.Lives, "life".Pluralize(player.Lives)
);