Question

I’m trying to clean up my URIs on a multi-language CI site by changing the segment containing the language name to just the two-character language code.

Currently, my URIs look like this:

http://example.com               //  Home (English)
http://example.com/english/home  //  Home (English)
http://example.com/home          //  404 (should go to english/home)

http://example.com/sv            //  404 (should go to swedish/home)
http://example.com/swedish/home  //  Home (Swedish)
http://example.com/sv/home       //  404 (should go to swedish/home)

I have experimented both with application/config/routes.php and .htaccess, but I feel I’m not making much progress. Which should I be using? How can I achieve my desired results?

As it stands, my files look like this:

// .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /example/index.php/$1 [L]

// application/config/routes.php (minus docs)
<?php
if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
$route['default_controller'] = "pages/view/home";
$route['([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)'] = "pages/view/$2";
?>

// application/controllers/page
<?php

class Pages extends CI_Controller {

    public function __construct() {
        parent::__construct();
        $this->language = $this->uri->segment(1);
    }

    public function view ($page = 'home') {

        if (!file_exists('application/views/pages/'.$page.'.php'))
            show_404();

        $data['title'] = $page;

        $this->lang->load('general',$this->language);
        $this->load->view('templates/header', $data);
        $this->load->view('pages/'.$page, $data);
        $this->load->view('templates/footer', $data);

    }
}
?>

Answer 1

Try this in routes.php:

$route['default_controller'] = "pages/view/home";
$route['(en|sv)'] = 'pages/view/home';
$route['(en|sv)/([a-z]+)'] = 'pages/view/$2';

Controller constructor:

function __construct(){
    parent::__construct();
    $this->lang_array = array('en' => 'english', 'sv' => 'swedish');
    $this->current_lang = $this->uri->segment(1, 'en');
}

View function:

public function view ($page = 'home') {
            $lang_folder = $this->lang_array[$this->current_lang];
            // $lang_folder will be 'english' by default
            // other stuff
            $this->lang->load('general', $lang_folder);

}