multilanguage website

[Mariano López]

I'm trying to make a multilanguage website. When the user enters the site, I want to detect the language and automatically make a redirection. How can I do this? And how should I organize my data base so the user can switch languages easily?

Thanks.

[Agelmar]

Mariano López wrote:

I'm trying to make a multilanguage website. When the user enters the
site, I want to detect the language and automatically make a
redirection. How can I do this? And how should I organize my data
base so the user can switch languages easily?

Thanks.

Detecting language... not easy at all. You could try to do a reverse lookup
on the IP address and grab a country from that, but that may be slow.
Personally, I would display either a map of the world with regions
clickable, or (my personal preference) flags. Then just keep that in the
query string (e.g. blah.php?lang=en) or in a session variable (perhaps less
preferable if you have a ton of users). When querying your db for content,
just tack on an extra row (of type enum) for the language.

My $.02
// Ian Fette
// Proponent comp.lang.php

[Mariano López]

Agelmar wrote:

Mariano López wrote:

I'm trying to make a multilanguage website. When the user enters the
site, I want to detect the language and automatically make a
redirection. How can I do this? And how should I organize my data
base so the user can switch languages easily?

Thanks.

Detecting language... not easy at all. You could try to do a reverse
lookup on the IP address and grab a country from that, but that may
be slow. Personally, I would display either a map of the world with
regions clickable, or (my personal preference) flags. Then just keep
that in the query string (e.g. blah.php?lang=en) or in a session
variable (perhaps less preferable if you have a ton of users). When
querying your db for content, just tack on an extra row (of type
enum) for the language.

My $.02
// Ian Fette
// Proponent comp.lang.php

Hi. I've found an easy solution to language detection by using Javascript (it checks the browser's language configuration).

Now I'm thinking if I'm going to use a session variable (I didn't want to mess with it, but maybe I do ;-)))

Thanks.

[sam]

You can use the ip-to-country database.

---------------- CUT HER ------------------------------
$user_ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$country_code_type = "name"; // can be "name", "code2" or "code3"

$h =
fopen("http://ip-to-country.directi.com/country/$country_code_type/$user_ip"
,'r');
$user_country = fgets($h,4096);
fclose($h);
---------------- END -----------------------------------

You can download the database from http://ip-to-country.directi.com and
you access it locally if you want.

For more details: http://ip-to-country.directi.com

Hope this helps.
"Mariano López" <vi******************@infovia.com.ar> wrote in message
news:be************@ID-156496.news.uni-berlin.de...
I'm trying to make a multilanguage website. When the user enters the site, I
want to detect the language and automatically make a redirection. How can I
do this? And how should I organize my data base so the user can switch
languages easily?

Thanks.

[Louis-Philippe Huberdeau]

You might want to look over some HTTP request headers:

$_SERVER[ 'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE' ]

Or look over get_browser(), there is one of the values that identifies
the browser's language if I remember well, but it should be the same value.

Agelmar wrote:

Mariano López wrote:

I'm trying to make a multilanguage website. When the user enters the
site, I want to detect the language and automatically make a
redirection. How can I do this? And how should I organize my data
base so the user can switch languages easily?

Thanks.

Detecting language... not easy at all. You could try to do a reverse lookup
on the IP address and grab a country from that, but that may be slow.
Personally, I would display either a map of the world with regions
clickable, or (my personal preference) flags. Then just keep that in the
query string (e.g. blah.php?lang=en) or in a session variable (perhaps less
preferable if you have a ton of users). When querying your db for content,
just tack on an extra row (of type enum) for the language.

My $.02
// Ian Fette
// Proponent comp.lang.php

[Zurab Davitiani]

Mariano López wrote on Saturday 12 July 2003 12:10:

I'm trying to make a multilanguage website. When the user enters the site,
I want to detect the language and automatically make a redirection. How
can I do this? And how should I organize my data base so the user can
switch languages easily?

If you run Apache or any capable web server, then you can leave the client
language detection and preference to it and let it serve appropriate
file(s). See more in Apache docs.

Then, based on which file is served, set language preferences in your PHP
app and allow change back and forth. As far as separating data, make sure
all language-specific content is defined separately from your main
application, and include() language-specific include files (containing
appropriate variables and language-specific content) in each script that
outputs or otherwise processes said content.

Depending on complexity of your application, and variety of languages this
could be anywhere from very simple to somewhat challenging.

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