How to convert 1 to “first”, 2 to “second”, and so on, in Ruby?

Question

Is there a built-in method in Ruby to support this?

Answer 1

I wanted an ordinalize method that has "first, second, third" rather than '1st, 2nd, 3rd' - so here's a little snippet that works up to 10 (and falls back to the Rails ordinalize if it can't find it).

class TextOrdinalize

  def initialize(value)
    @value = value
  end

  def text_ordinalize
    ordinalize_mapping[@value] || @value.ordinalize
  end

  private

  def ordinalize_mapping
    [nil, "first", "second", "third", "fourth", "fifth", "sixth", "seventh",
      "eighth", "ninth", "tenth" ]
  end

end

Here's how it works:

TextOrdinalize.new(1).text_ordinalize #=> 'first'
TextOrdinalize.new(2).text_ordinalize #=> 'second'
TextOrdinalize.new(0).text_ordinalize #=> '0st'
TextOrdinalize.new(100).text_ordinalize #=> '100th'