In RL10N/nsprintf: Easy Internationalized Message Pluralization

nsprintf: Easy Internationalized Message Pluralization

nsprintf provides a single function, nsprintf(), which makes it simple to construct internationalized message pluralizations.

This is a common problem in writing pluralized R messages that are communicated to the end-user. For example, imagine that you have code that executes an operation one or more times and you wish to communicate the number of iterations to the end-user via message(), warning(), or error(). You can address that in a number of ways, one of which is simply ignoring pluralization entirely:

n <- 2; message(paste0(n, " iterations occurred"))
n <- 1; message(paste0(n, " iterations occurred"))

The grammatical failure is obnoxious. Another is to construct an if-else loop based on the value of n:

n <- 2
if (n == 1) {
    message("One iteration occurred")
} else {
    message(paste0(n, " iterations occurred"))
}

This, however, is not internationalized code. No matter what language the end-user operates in, they will receive messages in English. The code itself is also verbose. The solution offered by base R, is ngettext(), which internationalizes the code, allowing a package developer to write translations using gettext. In this form, the code becomes:

n <- 2
sprintf(ngettext(n, "%d iteration occurred", "%d iterations occurred"), n)

If message translations are available, this code will invoke a gettext translation catalog to report a locally appropriate message translation. Unfortunately, the code is verbose and requires remembering two different function names. nsprintf implements this as a single function:

library("nsprintf")
n <- 2
nsprintf(n, "%d iteration occurred", "%d iterations occurred")

Package Installation

The package is available on CRAN and can be installed directly in R using:

install.packages("nsprintf")

The latest development version on GitHub can be installed using itself:

if (!require("ghit")) {
    install.packages("ghit")
}
ghit::install_github("RL10N/nsprintf")

RL10N/nsprintf documentation built on May 8, 2019, 5:56 a.m.