Facebook Cookbook

He Said, She Said: Dealing with Pronouns

Problem

Gender issues are complicated. I could just use the third-person pronouns (“they” and “their”) for everything, but that’s really not grammatically correct. How do I figure out whether to use “he” or “she”? And what about people who didn’t specify a gender on their Profiles?

Solution

The fb:pronoun tag will output the correct pronoun for the user specified by the uid parameter. The simplest form is:

<fb:pronoun uid="12345" />

Discussion

Just like the fb:name tag, the fb:pronoun tag gets itself into all kinds of trouble with possessives and reflexives and lots of other grammar ghouls that you don’t want to have to deal with. Luckily, FBML will deal with them for you! See Table 6-2 for a list of the tag’s parameters.

Table 6-2. Parameters for fb:pronoun

Name	Type	Default value	Description	They see	I see
uid	int	N/A	The Facebook user ID (uid) of the user or Page whose pronoun you want to show. You can also use loggedinuser or profileowner. This is the only required field.	“he”	“you”
capitalize	bool	false	Capitalize the pronoun.	“He”	“You”
objective	bool	false	Use the objective form (him/her/you/them).	“him”	“you”
possessive	bool	false	Use the possessive form (his/her/your/their).	“his”	“you”
reflexive	bool	false	Use the reflexive form (himself/herself/yourself).	“himself”	“yourself”
usethey	bool	true	Use “they” if gender is not specified.	“him” (but if I removed my gender, “they”)	“you”
useyou	bool	true	Use “you” if uid matches the logged-in user.	“your”	“your” ...