Android plurals treatment of “zero”

Question

The Android resource method of internationalisation is quite limited. I have had much better success using the standard java.text.MessageFormat.

Basically, all you have to do is use the standard string resource like this:

<resources>
    <string name="item_shop">{0,choice,0#No items|1#One item|1&lt;{0} items}</string>
</resources>

Then, from the code all you have to do is the following:

String fmt = getResources().getText(R.string.item_shop).toString();
textView.setText(MessageFormat.format(fmt, amount));

You can read more about the format strings in the javadocs for MessageFormat