[PATCH] trivial problem of using an irregular plural form that does not start with the same letter as the singular

Haha, rishes... Do you actually know of a word whose plural starts with a different letter?

Apparently, a genuine plural of cow is kine (see http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=kine). Not that I can see anyone using kine in preference to cows.

if someone does find a word like this, they will put it in their environment.rb inflector rules as agreed in #5047

smeade: You're wrong there. The irregular inflections assume that the first letter is always the same. I agree it's a low priority fix, but it is actually a bug and not an issue with creating custom inflections in environment.rb. Setting an irregular for "cow" to "kine" gives these transformations:

[/(c)ow$/i, "\\1ine"] #plurals
[/(k)ine$/i, "\\1ow"] #singulars

Clearly that can't be fixed without changing how the inflector generates its regexps.

patch for cow/kine - can't think of any other maybe other languages or proprietary systems have them ?? :)

irregular_first_char_plurals.diff

cow_kine_test.diff

Replying to hasmanyjosh:

smeade: You're wrong there. The irregular inflections assume that the first letter is always the same. I agree it's a low priority fix, but it is actually a bug and not an issue with creating custom inflections ...

Thanks for the catch. Of course you are right and I've submitted a patch to handle irregulars when first char is different, though I agree is low priority.

comments: in the current (trunk) implementation, the first character is captured and reused in the regular expression as a way to ensure the proper case (upper/lower case) is retained. The trailing characters are always assumed to be lowercase by convention (actually would be whatever you put in the irregular definition).

examples:

>> "Person".pluralize  
=> "People"
>> "PERSON".pluralize  
=> "People"
>> "person".pluralize  
=> "people"
>> "pEOPLE".singularize
=> "person"

this patch follows the same convention of matching the first character to the case of the submitted string and the rest to the string to the case as defined in the irregular.

>> "Cow".pluralize
=> "Kine"
>> "COW".pluralize
=> "Kine"
>> "cow".pluralize
=> "kine"
>> "kINE".singularize
=> "cow"

Merged patch + tests (r6216).

(In [7092]) Added support for pluralization with a different starting letter than the singular version (cow/kine) (closes #4929) [norri_b/hasmanyjosh]