Using select with messageformat

I am using MessageFormat (part of the intl extension) in PHP. The extension uses ICU 4.6.1.

However, the problem isn't with PHP.

I would like to format a piece of string by making a decision on the first token {0}:

When {0} is 0, the text should be a
When it is 1, the text should be b
For all other cases, the text should be c

I understand that this could be done with plural, =0 for the 0 case, but through my testing, it doesn't seem to work, most likely because offsets and custom plurals were introduced in 4.8.

I am thus, trying to accomplish that using select:

{0, select, 0 {a} other {{0,plural,one{b}other{c}}}}

However, for some reason, the message formatter was unable to format the above and returns false (couldn't format).

Why is this the case? Is there a problem with my syntax?

Quick update: After some digging, it seems that I cannot use select to match values that start with a number. Are there any ways around this?

Another update: Updated to ICU 49.1.2 and intl 3.0.0a2. I can now use =0, =1, etc, but this has stopped working (was working previously):

{0}{0, plural, one{a} other{b}}

where as this works:

{0, plural, one{a} other{b}}

Solution

I ended up upgrading to the latest version of intl and ICU 49.1.2.

However, once that was done, this would not work:

{0}{0, plural, one{a} other{b}}

But this worked:

{0, plural, =0{a} one{# b} other {# c}}