Question

I’m creating an open-source cms and was just wondering that which is the best way to add localizations? I already decided to have them in files similar to lang.en.php. I would assume arrays, but in which form?

$lang['xyz'] = "Text goes here!";
$lang['Text goes here!'] = "Translated text!";

Or should I create my custom parser and add localizations to a file, like this:

"Text goes here!" = "Translated text!";

And then just parse it.

What would you suggest? I tried to search but no results for me.

Martti Laine

Answer 1

I know the Gettext library for Desktop applications does something similar to your custom parser. Gettext has a module in PHP, but I’m not sure if it’s installed in most PHP installations by default.

Basically, you would write every string with it with a function name tr("How are you?"). Then create a function to translate it:

include('lang.es.php');
function tr($txt) {
   global $tr;
   if(array_key_exists($txt,$tr)) {
     return $tr($txt);
   }
   return $txt;
}

And in lang.es.php, have:

$tr = array();
$tr["How are you?"] = "¿Como Estas?";

You would probably want to do printf(tr("How are you, %s?"), $name); for variables, or proper nouns that should not be translated.