Question

Is there’s some global variable for gettin’ language code in django template or atleast passing it through view?
something like: {{ LANG }} should produce “en” for example..
I really not comfortable when people using request.LANGUAGE_CODE.

Detailed explanation would be appreciated =)

Answer 1

If it didn’t already exist, you would need to write a template context processor. Here’s how you’d do that.

Put this somewhere:

def lang_context_processor(request):
    return {'LANG': request.LANGUAGE_CODE}

And then, add a reference to it the TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS setting. Something like this:

from django.conf import global_settings

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = global_settings.TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS + (
    'myproject.myapp.templatecontext.lang_context_processor',
)

(I recommend adding to the global setting because it means you don’t break things accidentally when a new context processor is added to the defaults.)

However, it does exist, as the inbuilt template context processor django.template.context_processors.i18n. You can access it as LANGUAGE_CODE.

Purely for interest, here’s the definition of that function:

def i18n(request):
    from django.utils import translation
    return {
        'LANGUAGES': settings.LANGUAGES,
        'LANGUAGE_CODE': translation.get_language(),
        'LANGUAGE_BIDI': translation.get_language_bidi(),
    }

Make sure that you’re using a RequestContext for your template rendering, not a plain Context, or it won’t work.