Question

I have a multi-language website and I want to display the current language in the URI which is something like this:

URI:

www.domain.com/en/
www.domain.com/en/folder1/
www.domain.com/de/
www.domain.com/de/folder2/

DIRECTORY:

public_html/
public_html/folder1/
public_html/
public_html/folder2/

Then the en or de will be saved in a cookie to process the language code.
Is it possible to do these? Even without the actual folder of the en or de?

Answer 1

You can use mod_rewrite to internally rewrite the URI to remove the language and use the CO flag to set a cookie. So something like this (in the htaccess file in your document root):

RewriteEngine On
# first check the the folder/file actually exists:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[a-z]{2}/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1 -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1 -d
# rewrite and set cookie:
RewriteRule ^/?([a-z]{2})/(.*)$ /$2 [L,CO=lang:$1:domain.com]

This will set a cookie named lang with the value equal to the 2 letter prefix in the original URI and with the domain as domain.com.