Question

I am learning PHP (constantly) and I created some time ago a class that handles translations. I want to emulate gettext but getting the translated strings from a database. However, now that I see it again, I don’t like that, being a class, to call it I need to use $Translate->text('String_keyword');. I wouldn’t like either to have to use $T->a('String_keyword'); since that’s completely not intuitive.

I’ve been thinking a lot on how to make it to be called with a simple _('String_keyword'), gettext style but, from what I’ve learned from SO, I haven’t been able to find a ‘great’ way to accomplish this. I need to pass somehow the default language to the function, I don’t want to pass it every time I call it as it would be _('String_keyword', $User->get('Language'))). I also don’t want to include the user-detection script in the _() function, as it only needs to be run once and not every time.

The easiest one would be to use GLOBALS, but I’ve learned here that they are completely-utterly forbidden (could this be the only case where I can use them?), then I thought to DEFINE a variable with the user’s language like define ( USER_LANGUAGE , $User->get('Language') ), but it seems just to be the same as a global. These are the 2 main options I can see, I know there are some other ways like Dependency Injection but they seem to add just too much complication for a so simple request and I haven’t yet had time to dig into them.

I was thinking about creating a wrapper first to test it out. Something like this:

function _($Id, $Arg = null)
  {
  $Translate = new Translate (USER_LANGUAGE);
  return $Translate -> text($Id, $Arg)
  }

Here is the translation code. The language is detected before and passed to the object when created.

// Translate text strings
// TO DO: SHOULD, SHOULD change it to PDO! Also, merge the 2 tables into 1
class Translate
  {
  private $Lang;

  function __construct ($Lang)
    {
    $this->Lang = $Lang;
    }

  // Clever. Adds the translation so when codding I don't get annoyed.
  private function add ($Id, $Text)
    {
    $sql="INSERT INTO htranslations (keyword, en, page, last) VALUES ('$Id', '$Text', '".$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']."', now())";

    mysql_query($sql);
    }

  private function retrieve ( $Id )
    {
    $table = is_int ($Id) ? "translations" : "htranslations";      // A small tweak to support the two tables, but they should be merged.
    $results = mysql_query ("SELECT ".mysql_real_escape_string($this->Lang)." FROM ".$table." WHERE keyword='".mysql_real_escape_string($Id)."'");
    $row = mysql_fetch_assoc ($results);
    return mysql_num_rows ($results) ? stripslashes ($row[$this->Lang]) : null;
    }

  // If needed to insert a name, for example, pass it in the $Arg
  public function text($Id, $Arg = null)
    {
    $Text = $this->retrieve($Id);
    if (empty($Text))
      {
      $Text = str_replace("_", " ", $Id);  // If not found, replace all "_" with " " from the input string.
      $this->add($Id, $Text);
      }
    return str_replace("%s", $Arg, $Text);    // Not likely to have more than 2 variables into a single string.
    }
  }

How would you accomplish this in a proper yet simple (for coding) way? Are any of the proposed methods valid or can you come with a better one?

Answer 1

If the problem is simply that

$Translate->text('String_keyword');

feels to long, then consider making the Translate object into a Functor by implementing __invoke:

class Translate
{
    // all your PHP code you already have

    public function __invoke($keyword, $Arg = null)
    {
        return $this->text($keyword, $Arg)
    }
}

You can then instantiate the object regularly with all the required dependencies and settings and call it:

$_ = new Translate(/* whatever it needs */);
echo $_('Hallo Welt');

That would not introduce the same amount of coupling and fiddling with the global scope as you currently consider to introduce through a wrapper function or as the Registry/Singleton solution suggested elsewhere. The only drawback is the non-speaking naming of the object variable as $_().