making it more convenient to be plural

May 23, 2008 by Eric Richardson

Hello again neglected blog...

Ever since the April 1st launch of the new blogdowntown code, there's been a sloppy little bug that's bothered me, but not quite been bad enough to address. When putting comment counts on stories, I got sloppy and wrote:

<%= thumbnail.comments.length %> Comments

instead of being proper and making sure account for the singular case. Bottom-line: the conditional is ugly. I didn't want to have to write this everywhere:

<%= 
  story.comments.length.to_s + " " +  
  (story.comments.length == 1) ? "Comment" : "Comments" 
%>

So tonight I finally made the fix, but did it in a way that doesn't assault my senses. — Continue Reading...