multilingual site

[pradeepjain]

Hii guys!!

I need to create a multilingual site say another 2 languages! I am using indic scripts as of now! in which i need to create say another 3 pages in 3 languages . Its tedious job! Is there any other way to do the conversions on the fly and show the page to the end users! Hope i have asked the question in correct forum as ma site is developed using php and mysql Db driven!

[Markus]

@pradeepjain
I'm actually working on making a site multi-lingual now, in fact, so we have some common ground there.

Anyway, what I did was (after seeing Dorm do the same), create .ini language files that contain key => value pairs, that I could parse into an array using PHP's parse_ini_file() function. The lang files looked like this, note that the key has punctuation stripped (apart from hypens):
lang.en.ini

hello = "Hello"
goodbye = "Goodbye"
today = "Today"
 

All of your .ini files would share the same set of keys, where the value changes to the language in question. So the French language would look like this:
lang.fr.ini

hello = "Bonjour"
goodbye = "Au revoir"
today = "Aujourd'hui"
 

I then wrote a Language class that would produce an object with methods for retrieving values from the language array, parsing a new language array (parse_ini_file()), and others. The basic structure of that class:

<?php
 
class My_Lang {
 
    /**
     * Some doc
     */
    private $langs = array();
    /**
     * Some doc
     */
    private $dict = array();
 
    public function __construct($lang = null) {
        // Load a default language
        if (!$lang) {
             $this->lang = 'en';
        } else {
             $this->lang = $lang;
        }
 
        $this->loadLangs();
        $this->loadLang($this->lang);
    }
 
    /**
     * Loads all available language selectors from
     * some specified lang dir, into our
     * $langs array.
     *
     * @return bool
     */
    public function loadLangs() {
        // Load language selectors
        $this->langs = $availLangsArray;
    }
 
    /**
     * Loads language array into our $dict array
     * 
     * @return bool
     */
    public function loadLang($lang) {
        // Must be available to load
        if (!in_array($lang, $this->langs)) {
            throw new My_Lang_Not_Available;
        }
 
        $this->dict = parse_ini_file('/path/to/'. $lang. '.ini');
    }
 
}
 

[pradeepjain]

So this is one of the tedious process where in language file with corresponding key => value pair must be maintained .

@Markus

[Markus]

@pradeepjain
It's hardly tedious in the long run, but suit yourself :D