Java i18n Pluralisation using ChoiceFormat

Betfair‘s site is hugely popular all around the world, and obviously needs to provide a fully localised experience for users across different locales. Yesterday I was looking at how best to provide internationalisation (i18n) support within our core platform and came across the really useful ChoiceFormat class. I had seen it before but hadn’t actually explored what it can do until now. It’s an extremely basic class in terms of the functionality it provides, but it is as powerful as it is simple.

I’m sure we all know about Java resource bundles for i18n and have probably used them quite a lot – so I won’t go into any detail on that. I’ll just assume it’s common ground. However, if you haven’t come across java.text.ChoiceFormat, you’re missing out! This is the guts of pluralisation within the i18n stable, and is definitely your friend when you realise that users don’t like messages that say “Updated 1 second(s) ago”. You know it’s 1 second, right? So why not just say that and skip the “(s)” bit? I’m sure many have tried to solve this the hard way by doing the intelligence themselves (defining multiple keys and choosing which to use based on the argument to be passed into it), but this is where ChoiceFormat comes into play.

As per the docs, “The choice is specified with an ascending list of doubles, where each item specifies a half-open interval up to the next item”. So let’s use the example above to show how it would be defined in a resource bundle:

lastUpdated=Updated {0} {0,choice,0#seconds|1#second|1<seconds} ago

What this does is creates a bunch of contiguous ranges (in ascending order) and finds the best match. I said best match because sometimes there isn’t an exact match. In the example above, negative numbers don’t match any range – but because they’re smaller than the starting range, the first choice is selected. The same logic applies for values that are larger than the highest range (which isn’t possible in this example as the highest range ends at positive infinity).

So let’s run through the scenarios very quickly:

If you pass in a negative number, the first choice “seconds” is returned (because it is too small to match anything and the ranges work in ascending order)

If you pass in a number between 0 (inclusive) and 1 (exclusive), the first choice matches and “seconds” is returned

If you pass in number 1 (exactly), the second choice matches and “second” is returned

If you pass in a number greater than 1, the last choice matches and “seconds” is returned

You may have noticed that the definition is different for the last range. What this is effectively doing in code is calling ChoiceFormat.nextDouble(1) which returns the smallest double greater than 1, which is then used as the start of the range. This is not restricted to being used the last range, but can actually be used anywhere. There is a similar ChoiceFormat.previousDouble(double d) that is fairly self-explanatory.

Nifty! Even more so when you consider that some languages have multiple pluralisations to consider (e.g. Russian). So you can’t reasonably assume that you’re always dealing with a simple singular/plural as we have in English – sometimes there are many different plurals to take into account.