How to do multi-language development in PHP?

With the development of globalization, the field of software development is becoming increasingly international. Software developers not only need to pay attention to functional and performance needs, but also need to pay attention to users’ language preferences and cultural contexts, so that multi-language development becomes a An integral part of software development work. In PHP development, how to carry out multi-language development?

1. Determine the user’s language preference

Before conducting multi-language development, software developers need to confirm the user’s local language preference. To this end, the language used by the user can be obtained by accepting the user's browser settings (language preference). Generally, the browser settings determine the user's local language based on the user's IP address. You can use $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] to get the user's local language. For HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE, the common form is multiple languages ​​separated by commas, arranged according to the user's language usage weight. For example, "en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7" means that the user's preferred language is American English.

2. Use gettext for multi-language processing

After confirming the user’s local language preference, software developers need to prepare corresponding language resources. In PHP, using gettext is a better choice. gettext is a toolset for generating multilingual text for software, and it is also a cross-platform solution that not only supports PHP, but also supports other languages, such as Python, Ruby, etc.

gettext in PHP supports multi-language processing by directly calling the function gettext() in the program. The existing gettext function can be obtained from the gettext toolkit on GNU.org. It should be noted that before using this function, you need to call the bindtextdomain() function to specify the translation file location of the current program and other information.

3. Define text tags

Defining text tags as a standard multi-language processing method can avoid hard-coded text. In applications, developers should use mutable markup instead of mutable text. Tags consist of keywords and parameters. For example, the tag %product_name% represents the product name. The language pack file should maintain a product name so that the appropriate name can be chosen based on the client language.

It should be noted that the name of the tag can be defined by yourself. At the same time, you also need to avoid using tags like "Hello there, Mr. %name%!" because this will make it difficult for the translator to determine whether the tags are used correctly. Relatively speaking, "Hello %name%! You have %count% unread messages." This form is easier for translators to understand.

4. Create translation files

After the above tags are created, translation files need to be created in order to translate them into other languages. In gettext, translation files are divided into two types, namely .po files and .mo files. The

.po file is the original file used by gettext. It contains untranslated contents, as well as information such as the context and translation status of the content, and is described using a certain markup syntax. In a .po file, a msgstr field represents the translated text. The

.mo file is a compiled version of the .po file. It contains translated text and can be provided to the program.

5. Load and use the translation file

After completing the above steps, you need to enable the program to load and use the translation file. In PHP, use the bindtextdomain function to bind the translation file path to the current PHP application instance, then call its related functions to load the translation file, and return the translated content in the translation file to the application.

6. Summary

Using PHP for multi-language development requires judging user language preferences, using gettext for multi-language processing, defining text tags, creating translation files, loading and using translation files and so on, in order to design multilingual applications that suit users.

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