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• SelectFormat

SelectFormat supports the creation of internationalized messages by selecting phrases based on keywords. The pattern specifies how to map keywords to phrases and provides a default phrase. The object provided to the format method is a string that's matched against the keywords. If there is a match, the corresponding phrase is selected; otherwise, the default phrase is used.

UsingSelectFormat for Gender Agreement

Note: Typically, select formatting is done viaMessageFormat with aselect argument type, rather than using a stand-aloneSelectFormat.

The main use case for the select format is gender based inflection. When names or nouns are inserted into sentences, their gender can affect pronouns, verb forms, articles, and adjectives. Special care needs to be taken for the case where the gender cannot be determined. The impact varies between languages:

• English has three genders, and unknown gender is handled as a specialcase. Names use the gender of the named person (if known), nouns referringto people use natural gender, and inanimate objects are usually neutral.The gender only affects pronouns: "he", "she", "it", "they".
• German differs from English in that the gender of nouns is ratherarbitrary, even for nouns referring to people ("Mädchen", girl, is neutral).The gender affects pronouns ("er", "sie", "es"), articles ("der", "die","das"), and adjective forms ("guter Mann", "gute Frau", "gutes Mädchen").
• French has only two genders; as in German the gender of nounsis rather arbitrary - for sun and moon, the gendersare the opposite of those in German. The gender affectspronouns ("il", "elle"), articles ("le", "la"),adjective forms ("bon", "bonne"), and sometimesverb forms ("allé", "allée").
• Polish distinguishes five genders (or noun classes),human masculine, animate non-human masculine, inanimate masculine,feminine, and neuter.

Some other languages have noun classes that are not related to gender, but similar in grammatical use. Some African languages have around 20 noun classes.

Note:For the gender of aperson in a given sentence, we usually need to distinguish only between female, male and other/unknown.

To enable localizers to create sentence patterns that take their language's gender dependencies into consideration, software has to provide information about the gender associated with a noun or name toMessageFormat. Two main cases can be distinguished:

• For people, natural gender information should be maintained for each person. Keywords like "male", "female", "mixed" (for groups of people) and "unknown" could be used.

• For nouns, grammatical gender information should be maintained for each noun and per language, e.g., in resource bundles. The keywords "masculine", "feminine", and "neuter" are commonly used, but some languages may require other keywords.

The resulting keyword is provided toMessageFormat as a parameter separate from the name or noun it's associated with. For example, to generate a message such as "Jean went to Paris", three separate arguments would be provided: The name of the person as argument 0, the gender of the person as argument 1, and the name of the city as argument 2. The sentence pattern for English, where the gender of the person has no impact on this simple sentence, would not refer to argument 1 at all:

{0} went to {2}.

Note: The entire sentence should be included (and partially repeated) inside each phrase. Otherwise translators would have to be trained on how to move bits of the sentence in and out of the select argument of a message. (The examples below do not follow this recommendation!)

The sentence pattern for French, where the gender of the person affects the form of the participle, uses a select format based on argument 1:

{0} est {1, select, female {allée} other {allé}} à {2}.

Patterns can be nested, so that it's possible to handle interactions of number and gender where necessary. For example, if the above sentence should allow for the names of several people to be inserted, the following sentence pattern can be used (with argument 0 the list of people's names, argument 1 the number of people, argument 2 their combined gender, and argument 3 the city name):

{0} {1, plural,                one {est {2, select, female {allée} other  {allé}}}                other {sont {2, select, female {allées} other {allés}}}         }à {3}.

Patterns and Their Interpretation

TheSelectFormat pattern string defines the phrase output for each user-defined keyword. The pattern is a sequence of (keyword, message) pairs. A keyword is a "pattern identifier": [^[[:Pattern_Syntax:][:Pattern_White_Space:]]]+

Each message is aMessageFormat pattern string enclosed in {curly braces}.

You always have to define a phrase for the default keywordother; this phrase is returned when the keyword provided to theformat method matches no other keyword. If a pattern does not provide a phrase forother, the method it's provided to returns the errorU_DEFAULT_KEYWORD_MISSING.
Pattern_White_Space between keywords and messages is ignored. Pattern_White_Space within a message is preserved and output.

Example: UErrorCode status = U_ZERO_ERROR;MessageFormat *msgFmt = new MessageFormat(UnicodeString("{0} est  {1, select, female {allée} other {allé}} à Paris."), Locale("fr"),  status);if (U_FAILURE(status)) {      return;}FieldPosition ignore(FieldPosition::DONT_CARE);UnicodeString result;char* str1= "Kirti,female";Formattable args1[] = {"Kirti","female"};msgFmt->format(args1, 2, result, ignore, status);cout<< "Input is "<< str1<< " and result is: "<< result<< endl;delete msgFmt;

Produces the output:
Kirti est allée à Paris.

Stable:

ICU 4.4

Definition at line188 of fileselfmt.h.