PHP Cookbook

16.4. Localizing Text Messages

Problem

You want to display text messages in a locale-appropriate language.

Solution

Maintain a message catalog of words and phrases and retrieve the appropriate string from the message catalog before printing it. Here’s a simple message catalog with some foods in American and British English and a function to retrieve words from the catalog:

$messages = array ('en_US' => 
             array(
              'My favorite foods are' => 'My favorite foods are',
              'french fries' => 'french fries',
              'biscuit'      => 'biscuit',
              'candy'        => 'candy',
              'potato chips' => 'potato chips',
              'cookie'       => 'cookie',
              'corn'         => 'corn',
              'eggplant'     => 'eggplant'
             ),
           'en_GB' => 
             array(
              'My favorite foods are' => 'My favourite foods are',
              'french fries' => 'chips',
              'biscuit'      => 'scone',
              'candy'        => 'sweets',
              'potato chips' => 'crisps',
              'cookie'       => 'biscuit',
              'corn'         => 'maize',
              'eggplant'     => 'aubergine'
             )
            );

function msg($s) {
  global $LANG;
  global $messages;
  if (isset($messages[$LANG][$s])) {
    return $messages[$LANG][$s];
  } else {
    error_log("l10n error: LANG: $lang, message: '$s'");
  }
}

Discussion

This short program uses the message catalog to print out a list of foods:

$LANG = 'en_GB';
print msg('My favorite foods are').":\n";
print msg('french fries')."\n";
print msg('potato chips')."\n";
print msg('corn')."\n";
print msg('candy')."\n";
My favourite foods are:
               chips
               crisps
               maize
               sweets

To have the program output in American English instead of British English, just set $LANG to en_US.

You can combine the msg( ) ...