What's the Rails way to handle singular/plural possibility?

Question

When you present a message to the user that involves an entity that could be either singular or plural, Rails has a shortcut to handle that. I'm talking about this situation:

"Delete committee? Its X meeting(s) will also be deleted."

Rails has a way so that "meeting" is presented as "meeting" or "meetings" depending on X.

I can't remember what that way is. It's not String#pluralize.

Answer 1

Here it is:

http://noobkit.com/show/ruby/rails/rails-stable/actionpack/actionview/helpers/texthelper/pluralize.html

Answer 2

ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper::pluralize(count, singular, plural = nil)

Attempts to pluralize the singular word unless count is 1. If plural is supplied, it will use that when count is > 1, otherwise it will use the Inflector to determine the plural form

Examples:

  pluralize(1, 'person')
  # => 1 person

  pluralize(2, 'person')
  # => 2 people

  pluralize(3, 'person', 'users')
  # => 3 users

  pluralize(0, 'person')
  # => 0 people