Inflections

This gem's purpose is twofold: to remove the cruft from ActiveSupport's inflections and provide a more sane set of defaults for Ruby/Rails applications in English while also providing default rules for other languages.

At the time of this gem's publication, the English list of inflections in ActiveSupport is a mess. It is riddled with special cases such as a special pluralization rule for "octopus" and "virus", even though they follow a regular rule (as octopi and viri are disputed terms). Similar pluralization rules exist for "ox", "quiz", "mouse", "louse", etc.

Many of the special cases that ActiveSupport defines will not see the light of day in an application. Other rules exist that are actually gramatical exceptions, such as changing "f" to a "v" when encountered at the end of the word (which then requires even more rules to fix special words such as "drive", "safe", "hive", etc.). And, of course, who can forget the special pluralization of "cow" to the archaic term of Scottish origin, "kine" (the plural of "kye")?

Installation

Add the following to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'inflections'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Usage

Ruby on Rails

If you're using Rails, you're done. The default inflections defined in ActiveSupport will be overwritten, and you can continue to define your own special cases in config/intializers/inflections.rb. I18n's default locale (set in config/application.rb) will determine which inflections are loaded.

Otherwise

Wherever you need 'em:

require 'inflections/en' # Replace 'en' with your preferred locale.

Define your own additional rules as such:

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.singular /(phase)s$/i, '\1' 
  inflect.plural /(shel|kni)fe/, '\1ves'
  inflect.irregular 'foot', 'feet'
  inflect.uncountable %w( money )
end

Edge

If you're using the edge version of ActiveSupport (4.0.0.beta), the multilingual Inflector will be supported. You can use each set of inflection rules without needing to require them or worry about conflicts between languages. Just point your Gemfile to this git repository; each locale's set of inflection rules will be kept separately and you can use any of them side-by-side. Read more about the multilingual Inflector.

Languages Currently Supported

English (en)
British English (en-GB)
Spanish (es)
French (fr)
Kazakh (kk)
Norwegian Bokmål (nb)
Turkish (tr)

If you are fluent in a language not yet included in this gem, please consider creating a list of inflections and submitting a pull request.

Contributing

Please note that pull requests for already supported languages will only be accepted for rules that are in error or a potentially missed rule. If your change is an exception to an existing rule, that exception must occur frequently and must involve words used more frequently than the regular plurals. If your change is an irregularity, it must be a word that is arguably frequently encountered in applications that would use ActiveSupport. The default list of inflections is meant to be short.

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature') with tests
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create a new Pull Request

nebjak/inflections