Plurality in user messages

Question

Many times, when generating messages to show to the user, the message will contain a number of something that I want to inform the customer about.

I\'ll give a

Answer 1

If there is ever any chance, no matter how small, that this app will need to be translated to other languages then both are wrong. The correct way of doing this is:

string message = ( noofitemsselected==1 ?
  "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " item. Are you sure you want to delete it?":
  "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " items. Are you sure you want to delete them?"
);

This is because different languages handle plurality differently. Some like Malay don't even have syntactic plurals so the strings would generally be identical. Separating the two strings makes it easier to support other languages later on.

Otherwise if this app is meant to be consumed by the general public and is supposed to be user friendly then the second method is preferable. Sorry but I don't really know a shorter way of doing this.

If this app is meant to be consumed only internally by your company then do the shortcut "item(s)" thing. You don't really have to impress anybody when writing enterprisy code. But I'd advise against doing this for publicly consumed app because this gives the impression that the programmer is lazy and thus lower their opinion of the quality of the app. Trust me, small things like this matter.