Pluralize doesn't handle uncountable words in a sentence

Updated patch to avoid using dup

Great point Daniel

I think the dup was only there as a hold-over from the previous implementation. I'll amend the patch now.

Thanks again,

James

On 14 Nov 2008, at 13:36, Lighthouse wrote:

+1, with the latest change, this looks like an elegant solution.

Hmm, pluralize(word) intends to me that it's about pluralizing a word, not a phrase. If this was to pass, all the inflectors should be handling phrases. Which I think perhaps is a bit much to promise?

That could be a fair point; part of the motivation behind the patch is that, by the examples in the RDoc above it, I do expect pluralize to work on phrases:

"the blue mailman".pluralize # => "the blue mailmen"

If that example were to be removed, I wouldn't have so readily expected pluralise to work on my phrase ("sports equipment"), and would've created a wrapper for pluralize in my own app.

I'm not sure all the inflectors would need to know/care about phrases - probably only pluralize and singularize. As a rough sketch:

def with_last_word(phrase, &block)
  words = phrase.split(" ")
  last_word = words.pop
  words.push(yield(last_word))
  words.join(" ")
end

def pluralize(phrase)
  with_last_word(phrase) { |w| w + 's' }
end

def singularize(phrase)
  with_last_word(phrase) { |w| w.gsub(/s$/, '') }
end

pluralize("the dancing fool") # => "the dancing fools"
singularize("prancing idiots") # => "prancing idiot"

If you feel this is worthwhile, I'll work up a proper patch for both methods. Otherwise, I feel that the 'blue mailmen' example should be removed, as it's misleading and encourages the broken behaviour.