How to handle multilingual input in PHP forms

How to handle multi-language input in PHP forms

With the development of globalization, multi-language support for websites has become a necessary feature. In PHP development, how to handle multi-language input so that users can enter data in different languages ​​​​in the form and store and display the data correctly is an important issue that developers need to solve.

This article will introduce how to use PHP to process multi-language input and give corresponding code examples.

1. Set the language settings of the website
In the PHP code, we can use the setlocale function to set the language settings of the website. The syntax of this function is as follows:

setlocale(int $category, string $locale)

$category specifies the language category to be set. Commonly used categories include LC_ALL, LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC and LC_TIME, etc. $locale specifies specific language settings, such as "en_US.UTF-8" indicating the use of American English.

2. Create a multilingual input form
In HTML code, we can use the select element to create a multilingual input form. The code example is as follows:

<select name="language">
  <option value="en">English</option>
  <option value="zh-CN">简体中文</option>
  <option value="zh-TW">繁体中文</option>
</select>

Users can enter data in different languages ​​by selecting different options.

3. Process the language data input by the user
On the server side, we can obtain the language data input by the user through the $_POST or $_GET variable. The code example is as follows:

$language = $_POST['language'];

According to the language selected by the user, we can perform corresponding processing. For example, if the user selects English, we can set the language to "en_US"; if the user selects Simplified Chinese, we can set the language to "zh_CN".

4. Store and display multilingual data
In the database, we can use UTF-8 encoding to store multilingual data. In the MySQL database, we can use the utf8mb4 character set and utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation to support storing multi-language data. Examples of SQL statements to create tables are as follows:

CREATE TABLE `messages` (
  `id` int(11) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `content` text CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4;

In PHP code, we can use mysqli extension or PDO extension to connect to the database and perform operations to store multi-language data. The code example is as follows:

$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

$content = $_POST['content'];
$language = $_POST['language'];

$mysqli->set_charset("utf8mb4");
$content = $mysqli->real_escape_string($content);

$sql = "INSERT INTO messages (content, language) VALUES ('{$content}', '{$language}')";
$mysqli->query($sql);

When displaying multi-language data, we can correctly display the data stored in the database by setting appropriate language settings. The code example is as follows:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8");

$sql = "SELECT content, language FROM messages";
$result = $mysqli->query($sql);

while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
  if ($row['language'] == 'en') {
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8");
  } elseif ($row['language'] == 'zh-CN') {
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "zh_CN.UTF-8");
  } elseif ($row['language'] == 'zh-TW') {
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "zh_TW.UTF-8");
  }

  echo strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", strtotime($row['content']));
}

Through the above steps, we can process multi-language input in PHP forms. Developers can make corresponding modifications and adjustments in specific projects based on actual needs. Hope this article can be helpful to you!

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