How to pluralize "There is/are N object/objects"?

Question

Pluralizing a single word is simple:

pluralize(@total_users, "user")

But what if I want to print "There is/are N user/users":

There are 0 users
There is 1 user
There are 2 users

, i.e., how to pluralize a sentence?

Answer 1

You can add a custom inflection for it. By default, Rails will add an inflections.rb to config/initializers. There you can add:

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

You will then be able to use pluralize(@total_users, "is") to return is/are using the same rules as user/users.

EDIT: You clarified the question on how to pluralize a sentence. This is much more difficult to do generically, but if you want to do it, you'll have to dive into NLP.

As the comment suggests, you could do something with I18n if you just want to do it with a few sentences, you could build something like this:

  def pluralize_sentence(count, i18n_id, plural_i18n_id = nil)
    if count == 1
      I18n.t(i18n_id, :count => count)
    else
      I18n.t(plural_i18n_id || (i18n_id + "_plural"), :count => count)
    end
  end

  pluralize_sentence(@total_users, "user_count")

And in config/locales/en.yml:

  en:
    user_count: "There is %{count} user."
    user_count_plural: "There are %{count} users."