How to use gettext in php for multi-language support?

PHP is a very popular server-side programming language used for building dynamic websites and web applications. Usually, when developing web applications, we need to support multiple languages ​​to meet the needs of different users. This is why we need to use gettext for multi-language support.

gettext is a library that can extract strings from programs and translate them into other languages. It provides developers with a simple and powerful way to seamlessly switch between different languages. . This article will introduce how to use gettext for multi-language support.

Step 1: Install gettext

Before using gettext, we need to install it first. It can be installed through the following command:

sudo apt-get install gettext

After installation, we need to enable the gettext extension in the php.ini file. This can be achieved by editing the php.ini file and adding the following lines:

extension=php_gettext.dll

Step 2: Generate translation files

gettext uses .po and .mo files for translation. We need to first generate a .po file, which contains all the strings that need to be translated and their corresponding original texts.

We can use POEdit or other similar tools to generate .po files. In POEdit, we can open our application code and add all the strings in it to a .pot template file, then save the .pot file as a .po file.

In the .po file, each raw string is contained between msgid and msgstr. We can replace the text in msgstr with the desired translated text. After saving the .po file, you can use a command called msgfmt to compile it into a .mo file so that it can be used efficiently by PHP code.

msgfmt -o lang/fr_FR/LC_MESSAGES/messages.mo lang/fr_FR/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po

This command will generate a file named messages.mo, which contains all the strings that need to be translated.

Step 3: Implement multi-language support

After obtaining the .mo file, we need to use the gettext function in the PHP code for multi-language support. The function of gettext function is to get the original string and return its translated version.

The following is a simple sample code that demonstrates how to use the gettext function in PHP to achieve multi-language support:

<?php
    // 设置系统的语言环境为fr_FR
    putenv("LC_ALL=fr_FR");
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "fr_FR");

    // 加载翻译文件 
    bindtextdomain("messages", "./lang");
    bind_textdomain_codeset("messages", "UTF-8");
    textdomain("messages");

    // 从翻译文件中获取翻译后的字符串
    echo gettext("Hello World!");
?>

In the above code, we first set the system's locale to French (fr_FR). We then use the bindtextdomain function to load the .mo file we compiled earlier. This function requires two parameters: the first parameter is the domain name, which specifies the collection of strings to be converted into translation strings; the second parameter is the directory where the .mo file is located.

Next, we use the textdomain function to specify the domain to use. In the code above, we set it to the messages domain, which is the domain we specified earlier in the PO file.

Finally, we use the gettext function to get the translated version of the original string. In the above code, we pass Hello World! as a raw string to the gettext function, which will find the translated version of the string and return it.

Conclusion

In this article, we introduced how to use gettext for multi-language support. gettext can be very convenient to implement multi-language support in PHP programming, just write the original string and convert it into a translated string. Although this requires extra work, it can lead to a better experience for users and make your application more attractive.

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