Question

I am trying to make a site multi lingual. by building a language dictionary array ( if it is not the best way please don’t hesitate to let me know )

$fr=array();

$fr['hello']="Bonjour";

I would like to make a function that does the following :

for every word and language function ( $word ="hello",$language="fr")

it would return the right value. So far the way I am doing isn’t working

echo $$language[$word];

any ideas?
thank you

Answer 1

By default, variables are local to a function. If your dictionary arrays are global, you need to declare them as global, but since the names are variable, you have to access them via $GLOBALS:

function foo($word, $language) {
  echo $GLOBALS[$language][$word];
}

As for a better way, you might want to use just one multi-dimensional array instead of creating one variable for each language:

$dict = array();
$dict['fr']['hello'] = 'Bonjour';

function foo($word, $language) {
  global $dict;
  echo $dict[$language][$word];
}