To differentiate between plural and singular strings, you can define a plural in your strings.xml file and list the different quantities, as shown in the example below:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
<plurals name="hello_people">
<item quantity="one">Hello to %d person</item>
<item quantity="other">Hello to %d people</item>
</plurals>
</resources>
This definition can be accessed from Java code by using the getQuantityString()
method of the Resources
class, as shown in the following example:
getResources().getQuantityString(R.plurals.hello_people, 3, 3);
Here, the first parameter R.plurals.hello_people
is the resource name. The second parameter (3
in this example) is used to pick the correct quantity
string. The third parameter (also 3
in this example) is the format argument that will be used for substituting the format specifier %d
.
Possible quantity values (listed in alphabetical order) are:
few
many
one
other
two
zero
It is important to note that not all locales support every denomination of quantity
. For example, the Chinese language does not have a concept of one
item. English does not have a zero
item, as it is grammatically the same as other
. Unsupported instances of quantity
will be flagged by the IDE as Lint warnings, but won't cause complication errors if they are used.