PHP and gettext for I18n

It looks complicated on first sight, because GNU gettext is very powerful. But it can be done in 10 minutes to setup a simple example which scales to an arbitrary complex application.

index.php

<?php

session_start();

// I18N support information here
$language = 'en';

if ($_REQUEST['lang']) {
    $language = $_REQUEST['lang'];
}

putenv("LANG=$language");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $language);

// Set the text domain as 'messages'
$domain = 'messages';
bindtextdomain($domain, "locale");
textdomain($domain);

echo(gettext("This is text number one."));
echo(gettext("This is a second text."));

echo('<br/>');

echo('<a href="' . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . '?lang=en' . '">English</a>');
echo('<br>');
echo('<a href="' . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . '?lang=de' . '">German</a>');

?>

Simple, eh?

Now you have to setup the language files. Go to the directory where your index.php resides and use xgettext -n *.php. I use cygin on Win32 for this purpose. You will get a file named messages.po.

Setup the following directory structure (project is assumed to be the base directory):

project/
    locale/
      de/
          LC_MESSAGES/
      en/
          LC_MESSAGES/
  index.php

Copy the generated messages.po to the LC_MESSAGES directories.
Edit the copied messages.po files. Under every entry msgid there is an entry msgstr. This is where you put the translated version.

Since you can leave the English version under en as it is (in index.php, English strings are used), you will get the following locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po:

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2004-02-01 10:34+0100\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=CHARSET\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

#: index.php:20
msgid "This is text number one."
msgstr "Dies ist der Text Nummer eins."

#: index.php:21
msgid "This is a second text."
msgstr "Das ist ein zweiter Text."

For every copied messages.po, invoke msgfmt.exe messages.po
Note: For xgettext to work properly, you have to use double quotes (”) as string delimiters. Quotes (’) don’t work with most versions of xgettext, though a version for PHP is planned.
Note: Especially on Win32, you may have to restart Apache after changes to your translations.
Done!

See:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2002/06/13/php.html

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.gettext.php

uberdose 2.0

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PHP and gettext for I18n

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uberdose 2.0