Question

In my applications I make use of Exception(s) to control the flow.

I use something like this:

throw new Exception("Unable to add new user, user already exist");

This method is perfect in an application with one language. However, when I intend to make a multilingual application, I don’t know what to do.

The previous line of code should produce a message in the default language that the user is using.

What are some possible solutions??

Answer 1

The general solution is that you have some setting to indicate the current language that the message should be displayed in. Then you have a file or a database table (though this might not be good if messages about database connection errors are stored in the database – you want the error messages as easily accessible as possible – might be best to load them ALL into some cache when the app starts up) somewhere that contains all your error strings, and in multiple languages, such as:

userExists.English = "Unable to add new user, user already exist"
userExists.Spanish = "<my Spanish isn't good enough to even try>"
userExists.ClassicalMongolian = ...

Then when you throw the exception, you have something like

//currentLanguage indicates what the language of the current session is.
//the function lookupExceptionString must be able to look up the
//correct string based on the value of currentLanguage
exceptionString = lookupExceptionString(currentLanguage);
throw new Exception(exceptionString );

…But luckily for you there are frameworks that already do a lot of it. Do a web search for “php internationalization”, or “php i18n”, The first link I found was this:

http://php-flp.sourceforge.net/getting_started_english.htm