[Feature Proposal] Inflect the indefinite article in ActiveSupport

rubyonrails-core
1

I noticed when trying to generate a Rails scaffold for a model name that begins with a vowel sound that the generated test name did not inflect the English indefinite article correctly.

# bin/rails g scaffold Author
# resulting test in est/system/authors_test.rb
  # rest of test class 
  test "creating a Author" do
    # body omitted
  end

  test "updating a Author" do
    # body omitted
  end

  test "destroying a Author" do
    # body omitted
  end

I opened a Github issue for the lack of agreement on the generated test and have a simple fix in a pull request that fixes the issue by editing out the indefinite article, but I think it would be beneficial to have this type of inflection in ActiveSupport. (Something like ActiveSupport::Inflector#indefinitize)

Considerations:

  • In English there are words that begin with a vowel but not a vowel sound (a universe) and words that begin with a consonant but have a vowel sound (an honor). This could be solved by adding new configuration options to active_support/inflector/inflections inflect.begins_with_vowel_sound(/regex/)
  • The inflection of the indefinite article (and the definite article) requires gender in the romance languages. A solution that solves for it would need to be able to handle locale options.
  • Setting up something to handle gender agreement for languages that use them would require integration with a dictionary of some sort because placing all of the gendered nouns in a language in config is not viable.