Better API for plurals, for better extraction

[joshhunt]

🚀 Feature Proposal

A new API for specifying plurals in code, with explicit default messages for all plural forms.

Motivation

Many people's i18n workflow is to write default phrases in UI code with explicit keys with t() / <Trans />, and then extract them with i18next-parser.

Plurals make this very awkward because there's no way to extract additional plural forms from source code, so you must write one form in code, run i18n-parser, then go edit the json messages file with the additional forms. It also means there's no single source of truth for phrases, as additional plural forms would only live in the json messages file.

Example

t.plural("inbox.new-messages", {
  other: "You have {count} new messages",
  one: "You have {count} new message"
}, { count })

I can't really see a great API for supporting this with the React <Trans />.

---

If accepted, I'm happy to work on this and contribute it to i18next, and the required changes to i18next-parser.

See also i18next/i18next-parser#998

[jamuhl]

defaultValue already supports defining plural forms: https://www.i18next.com/translation-function/essentials#overview-options

[adrai]

example:

        <Trans
          i18nKey="newMessages"
          count={count}
          tOptions={{
            defaultValue_one: "You have a message.",
            defaultValue_other: "You have {{count}} messages.",
          }}
        />

https://react.i18next.com/latest/trans-component#trans-props

[joshhunt]

Ahhh - good catch. I had not noticed that.

Personally, I think that API is kind of awkward, but happy to give it a go 👍