Laravel 5 String Helpers: Pluralization and Strings

The plural helper method will attempt to return a plural version of the given $value. It does this through a series of specialized internal functions, that will not be covered in great detail here. This helper method will apply general rules to strings ending in common character sequences, handle special cases and will not attempt some very specific strings. The change in a word, such as to show tense, or the number of items, is called an inflection.

#Signature

Te signature of the plural method is:

1public static function plural(
2        $value,
3        $count = 2
4    );

#Example Use

The method takes the $value that should be pluralized, and the $count of the items. If the $count is equal to 1, the original $value is returned.

 1use Illuminate\Support\Str;
 2 
 3// cow
 4echo Str::plural('cow', 1);
 5 
 6// cows
 7echo Str::plural('cows');
 8 
 9// person
10echo Str::plural('person', 1);
11 
12// people
13echo Str::plural('person');

Assuming the following messages array:

1// The user's messages.
2$messages = [
3    'You have a meeting on Saturday.',
4    'Your inbox is 90% full',
5    'Do not eat yellow snow'
6];

We could display the number of messages to the user like so:

1use Illuminate\Support\Str;
2 
3$messageCount = count($messages);
4 
5echo 'You have '.$messageCount.' unread '.
6     Str::plural('message',$messageCount);

If the user had one message, the above example would output:

1You have 1 unread message.

Since the $messages array has 3 items in it, the user would see this:

1You have 3 unread messages.

#plural Special Cases

Any words, or word endings, in the following table will not be affected by the plural method. This is either because the resulting word is already plural, or because there is no inflection available. Word endings are denoted by the prefix *:

The following table lists the words that are not inflected by the plural method. This is either because the resulting word is already pluralized, or because there are no clear inflection rules available, or they handled separately (see the plural Special cases table).

In addition to the general words that are not inflected by the plural method, the following tables list the word patterns or values that will also not be inflected by this method:

There are also many special cases handled by the plural method. These are generally words that do not have a clear pragmatic method of handling the process of converting the word to its plural equivalent:

#Global str_plural Helper Function

The str_plural function is a shortcut to calling Str::plural. This function is declared in the global namespace.

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