Localizing concatenated or dynamic strings

Question

I'm familiar with using NSLocalizedString() to localize strings, but the problem I have today requires a little more finesse. My situation is like this:

NSString *userName; //the users name, entered by the user.  Does not need localized
NSString *favoriteFood; //the users favorite food, also entered by user, and not needing localized

NSString *summary = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@'s favorite food is %@", userName, favoriteFood];

This works fine for english, but not every language uses the same word ordering as English, for example, a word-by-word translation of the same sentance from Japanese into English would read:

UserName's favorite food pizza is

Not to mention that 's is doesn't make a possessive in every language.

What techniques are available for localizing this type of concatenated sentence?

UPDATE FOR THE BENEFIT OF OTHERS: @Jon Reed is right, positional specifiers are very important to localization. The document he linked only contains a reference to the fact that they can be used with NSString, NSLog, an others, the link doesn't really tell HOW to use them.

I found this link, that explains it well. It also explains my question better than I did. From the link:

Format strings for printf and sprintf (see Printf) present a special problem for translation. Consider the following:1

 printf(_"String `%s' has %d characters\n",
           string, length(string))) A possible German

translation for this might be:

 "%d Zeichen lang ist die Zeichenkette `%s'\n" The problem

should be obvious: the order of the format specifications is different from the original! Even though gettext can return the translated string at runtime, it cannot change the argument order in the call to printf.

To solve this problem, printf format specifiers may have an additional optional element, which we call a positional specifier. For example:

 "%2$d Zeichen lang ist die Zeichenkette `%1$s'\n" Here, the

positional specifier consists of an integer count, which indicates which argument to use, and a ‘$’. Counts are one-based, and the format string itself is not included. Thus, in the following example, ‘string’ is the first argument and ‘length(string)’ is the second:

 $ gawk 'BEGIN {
 >     string = "Dont Panic"
 >     printf _"%2$d characters live in \"%1$s\"\n",
 >                         string, length(string)
 > }'
 -| 10 characters live in "Dont Panic"

Answer 1

Applying NSLocalizedString() to the format string @"%@'s favorite food is %@" should allow it to be replaced with the proper word order and possessives for the local language.

Answer 2

To specify order of substitution, use %1$@ and %2$@ as your format specifiers. The localized format string can use them in any order. For example, say your string key is "FavoriteFood". Call

NSString *summary =
            [NSLocalizedString(@"FavoriteFood", nil), userName, favoriteFood];

The localization places the format specifiers wherever it makes sense for its locale. Example:

"FavoriteFood" = "%2$@ is the favorite food of %$1@";

String Format Specifiers