A/An articles in Ruby

Question

Is there something like [#pluralize in ActiveSupport][1] but for a/an articles?

So basically I need something like:

'status'.articleize # => "a status"
'urgent'.articleize # => "an urgent"

Answer 1

You could define String#articleize to return the appropriate English article:

class String
  def articleize
    if self[0] =~ /[aeiou]/i
      "an #{self}"
    else
      "a #{self}"
    end
  end
end

'status'.articleize # => "a status"
'urgent'.articleize # => "an urgent"