Question

I implemented a multilanguage feature for my web application. I get the values by this

echo $lang['the key here'];

and i keep the values in a separate fiels like this

$lang['confirm'] = 'COnfirm the message';
$lang['deny'] = 'Deny the invitation';

so i want if somebody calls a undefined key like $lang[‘sdefscfef’] , insted of printing white space, I want to print the key name i.e ‘sdefscfef’

I want to make it as a function

function translate($string) {
if(! isset($string)) {
echo THE KEY;
}
else {
echo $string;
}
}

translate($lang['asdadad']);

and to print the key

Answer 1

Instead of printing the array directly I would create a function (_() is common) and use it like so:

echo _('Welcome');

And the _() function would then look in the $language array:

function _ ($str) {
    global $language;

    return isset($language[$str]) ? $language[$str] : $str;
}

Something like that.

If you want to avoid using a global variable you can wrap all of this in a class like this:

class Lang {
    private $lang = array();

    public static translate ($str) {
        return isset(self::$lang[$str]) self::$lang[$str] : $str;
    }
}

And then, to avoid having to type Lang::translate() everywhere you can do this:

function _ ($str) {
    return Lang::translate($str);
}

Here’s an example of a little more advanced Language class: http://code.google.com/p/sleek-php/source/browse/trunk/Core/Lang.php