Question

So following is what I would like to do, be able to access I18n locale as a constant.For example:

if (I18n.locale == I18n.locales.en)
puts "You are using viewing page in english"
end

Is there a way to access these constants (I18n.locales.en is just example to clarify)? I can always write

if (I18n.locale.to_s == "en")

but I would like to avoid that. Since code is less readable with that approach.

Answer 1

You could shorten your second statement to be if (I18n.locale == :en) rather than converting to a string, however that’s still missing the point of using Rails’ locale support. For example, with this yml file:

en:
  hello: "Hello world!"
fr:
  hello: "Bonjour tout le monde !"

You should just be able to do this without any conditional statements:

puts I18n.translate(:hello)

and it would give you the appropriate translation.

If you really wanted to be able to do something like your first example, then you could override method_missing on the Symbol class. If you did this:

class Symbol
  def method_missing(method_name, *arguments)
    if method_name.to_s[-1,1] == "?"
      self.to_s == method_name.to_s[0..-2]
    else
      super
    end
  end
end

Then you could do this:

if I18n.locale.en?
  puts "english"
end