[development] Translatable strings for 1st/2nd/3rd/nth

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Gabor Hojtsy <gabor at hojtsy.hu>:

> Earnie Boyd wrote:
>> Quoting Chris Kennedy <chrisken at mail.utexas.edu>:
>>> Does anyone have suggestions for creating translatable strings for 
>>> rankings?
>>>
>>> I need to generate strings for 1st/2nd/3rd/4th/etc. ideally without a
>>> limit, but don't know of a simple translatable solution.
>>>
>>> Right now I just have individual t() strings for 1st/2nd/3rd, then a
>>> blanket t($i .'th') for the rest, under the untested theory that
>>> translators could manually add translations for Nth into their .po files
>>> up to a reasonable limit. I realize that this will not work for
>>> extractor.php purposes and is English-centric.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Are there existing math libraries that might help?  Simple solution 
>> might be a SQL table that you add the exceptions to 'th' to.  So the 
>> translation for 1 would contain 1st and the translation for 2 would 
>> 2nd and your 'th' default would be suffixed for everything else.
>
> Earnie, how would that SQL table work for translations? Different 
> languages need very different suffixes. I don't see what table 
> structure you envision here.
>

Chris was looking for "simple" and and realized his needs are 
"English-centric" but was wanting some way to possibly support simple 
translation.

int|locale|string
1|en|st
2|en|nd

So now he creates a function to look for the passed int value and 
locale and appends the suffix or some administrated set default.  No it 
doesn't fit all scenarios.

Frankly, I would suggest using t('first'), t('second'), etc instead of 
the lazy symbols.

Earnie