PHP Cookbook

2.10. Printing Correct Plurals

Problem

You want to correctly pluralize words based on the value of a variable. For instance, you are returning text that depends on the number of matches found by a search.

Solution

Use a conditional expression:

$number = 4;
print "Your search returned $number " . ($number == 1 ? 'hit' : 'hits') . '.';
Your search returned 4 hits.

Discussion

It’s slightly shorter to write the line as:

print "Your search returned $number hit" . ($number == 1 ? '' : 's') . '.';

However, for odd pluralizations, such as “person” versus “people,” we find it clearer to break out the entire word rather than just the letter.

Another option is to use one function for all pluralization, as shown in the pc_may_pluralize( ) function in Example 2-2.

Example 2-2. pc_may_pluralize( )

function pc_may_pluralize($singular_word, $amount_of) {

    // array of special plurals
    $plurals = array(
        'fish' => 'fish',
        'person' => 'people',
    );

    // only one
    if (1 == $amount_of) {
        return $singular_word;
    }

    // more than one, special plural
    if (isset($plurals[$singular_word])) {
        return $plurals[$singular_word];
    }

    // more than one, standard plural: add 's' to end of word
    return $singular_word . 's';
}

Here are some examples:

$number_of_fish = 1;
print "I ate $number_of_fish " . pc_may_pluralize('fish', $number_of_fish) . '.';

$number_of_people = 4; 
print 'Soylent Green is ' . pc_may_pluralize('person', $number_of_people) . '!';
I ate 1 fish.
               Soylent Green is people!

If you plan to have multiple plurals inside ...