Question

This is strange question in sense that I don’t think there is answer for it but here it goes.

I am looking for gem which would allow me to get root word from pluralized word.

categories => category
people     => person
apples     => apple

Trick is I need it in ruby and not in ROR so solution should be independent from ActiveRecord which probably has this mechanism built in. Thanks. There is also paper on this subject that I found http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Plurals.html/ in case somebody is interested in building the gem 🙂

Answer 1

This behaviour is defined in ActiveSupport, which you can include on its own without having to require Rails completely.

>> require 'rubygems'
=> true
>> require 'active_support/core_ext/string/inflections'
=> true
>> "categories".singularize
=> "category"