Handle plurals in Swift with inflection

Inflection is a powerful tool in Swift that allows developers to handle plurals and other linguistic variations in a more elegant way. This post will explore how to use inflection in Swift, providing examples and best practices.

What is Inflection?

a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender.
Inflection in Swift allows you to automatically adjust the form of words based on context, such as singular or plural forms. This is particularly useful in user interfaces where you want to display text that changes based on user input or data.

Code

import SwiftUI

struct BookCollection: View {
    @State private var bookCount: Int = 0

    var body: some View {
        VStack {
            Text("You've bought ^[\(bookCount) book](inflect: true) this year!")

            Button("Add a book") {
                bookCount += 1
            }
        }
    }
}

#Preview {
    BookCollection()
}

In this example, we create a simple SwiftUI view that displays the number of books purchased. The Text view uses an inflection feature to automatically handle the pluralization of the word "book" based on the value of bookCount. When bookCount is 1, it will display "1 book", and for any other number, it will display the correct plural form "books".
This approach makes it easy to manage plurals without having to write additional logic or conditional statements, leading to cleaner and more maintainable code.

Supported languages

Inflection supports (as of writing this article) the following languages:

• English
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Italian
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Spanish

Conclusion

Inflection in Swift is a powerful feature that simplifies the handling of plurals and other linguistic variations in your applications. By using inflection, you can create more dynamic and user-friendly interfaces without cluttering your code with complex logic. This not only enhances the user experience but also improves code readability and maintainability.

Read more

• SwiftUI ViewModifiers • 6 minutes reading time.
• LabeledContent in SwiftUI • 2 minutes reading time.
• Pull-to-Refresh in SwiftUI • 2 minutes reading time.

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