I want to translate the generic phrase “x hours and y mintues”. Of course, if it’s only one hour, it should say “1 hour and y mintutes”. The same goes for minutes, “x hours and 1 minute.” I know _n() handles the single/plural issue, but what is the best practice on handling two numbers in a phrase?

Method 1

printf(_n("%d hour", "%d hours", $hours), $hours);
_e(" and ");
printf(_n("%d minute", "%d minutes", $mins), $mins);

Works, but concatenating strings makes translation inflexible. I’d expect not all languages would work with “[hour phrase] [and phrase] [minutes phrase]”.

Method 2

printf(
    "%s and %s",
    sprintf(_n("%d hour", "%d hours", $hours), $hours),
    sprintf(_n("%d minute", "%d minutes", $mins), $mins)
);

This seems right, but seems like it would be hard to translate without context. Maybe I need to add context with _x()?

Solution I went with:

something more readable @toscho

function nice_time($minutes) {
    $hours = floor($minutes/60);
    $minutes = $minutes % 60;
    
    if ($hours == 0 && $minutes == 0) {
        return __("no length of time", 'context');
    } else if ($hours == 0 && $minutes == 1) {
        return __("1 minute", 'context');
    } else if ($hours == 1 && $minutes == 0) {
        return __("1 hour", 'context');
    } else if ($hours == 1 && $minutes == 1) {
        return __("1 hour and 1 minute", 'context');
    } else if ($hours == 0) {
        return sprintf(__("%d minutes", 'context'), $minutes);
    } else if ($minutes == 0) {
        return sprintf(__("%d hours", 'context'), $hours);
    } else if ($hours == 1) {
        return sprintf(__("1 hours and %d minutes", 'context'), $minutes);
    } else if ($minutes == 1) {
        return sprintf(__("%d hours and 1 minutes", 'context'), $hours);
    } else {
        return sprintf(__("%d hours and %d minutes", 'context'), $hours, $minutes);
    }
}