Question

how are you guys? I’m trying to make my PHP script accept many languages, and give the admin the option of change the Phrases in the script.

So, I found that many people store the Phrases in the database, but my question is do I need to SELECT all the phrases from my database each time I opened a page ? or what I have to do?

        Phrase                      EN                          FR
        -----------------------------------------------------------------------
        err_no_page         There was an error.         il y avait une erreur.

in each page I need to use maybe phrases, what is the perfect method to get them from the database without exhausting the server.

Thank’s in advance.

Answer 1

You should normalize your database like this:

PHRASES

ID    DESCRIPTION
----  ----------------
1     'err_no_page'
2     'another phrase'

TRANSLATIONS

ID    PHRASE_ID  LANGUAGE_ID  TRANSLATION
--    ---------  -----------  -------------------------
1     1          'en'         'There was an error.'
2     1          'fr'         'il y avait une erreur.'
3     2          'en'         'etc'

Then you can just select all the translations for a single language directly:

SELECT
    p.description, t.translation
FROM 
    phrases p
    INNER JOIN translations t ON t.phrase_id = p.id
WHERE
    t.language_id = 'en'

The benefit of doing it this way is that you can easily add more languages without changing the structure of your database.

If these phrases are used frequently (as they probably are in a web app) then you should consider reading them in once into some kind of in-memory dictionary cache when your application starts up, rather than retrieving them from the database for each page load.

EDIT

Check out the PHP module memcache for a possible way to implement your cache.