Laravel 5.5: Translating Strings with the "trans_choice" Helper Function

The trans_choice helper function can be used to translate a line of text that is dependent on a number of items in a collection. For example, if you were developing an application to retrieve messages from an IMAP inbox, you might want the ability to display "You have 1 unread message" vs. "You have 3 unread messages". The trans_choice method, like the trans method, accepts an array of replacements that can be used to dynamically build out the translated string.

Replacements are passed as a key/value pair. The replacement keys will be matched to any placeholders within the translation string. Placeholders begin with a single colon (:) followed by a name and a space. For example, in the validation.php language file, the following lines can be found:

 1<?php
 2 
 3return [
 4 
 5    // ...
 6 
 7    'accepted'     => 'The :attribute must be accepted.',
 8    'active_url'   => 'The :attribute is not a valid URL.',
 9 
10    // ...
11 
12];

In the above translation lines, :attribute is a placeholder that can be replaced using the $parameters parameter. The following code examples will demonstrate the results of the $parameters parameter.

#Signature

The signature of the trans_choice method is:

1function trans_choice(
2    $key,                 // The translation text key.
3    $number,              // The number of items.
4    array $replace = [],  // The replacements to make.
5    $locale = null        // An optional locale to use.
6);

#Example Use

For this section, we will create a new file at /resources/lang/en/plural.php:

1<?php
2 
3return [
4    'books' => 'There is one book.|There are :count books.',
5];

We can observe the results of the trans_choice method with the following examples

1// Get the translated text for one item.
2$oneItem = trans_choice('plural.books', 1);
3 
4// Get the translated text for two items.
5$multipleItems = trans_choice('plural.books', 2);

After the above code has executed, the $oneItem variable would contain the value There is one book. and the $multipleItems variable would contain the value There are 2 books..

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