Multilingual Websites with PHP

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• Multilingual Websites with PHP
• Nirav Mehta
• Linux Bangalore 2004

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Session Plan

• Language basics
• Unicode and pre-Unicode
• PHP and Unicode
• Different Solutions
• Example Experiences
• Resources

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There are more than 6800 spoken languages in the
world

• More than 90 of these are spoken by less than 1
  lac, 537 are spoken only by 50 people.
• There are 46 languages that are spoken only by 1
  person.
• In India alone, we are have more than 20 official
  languages.

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English is predominant on the Internet, yet a
large demand exists for solutions in other
languages
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People came up with many interesting solutions to
represent their languages in the computer
ASCII, ISCII
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Unicode provides globally accepted standards for
encoding all languages / characters
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Unicode fonts display the actual characters.
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UTF-8 is a standard to encode Unicode characters
in numbers.
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PHP does not natively support Unicode, but works
well with UTF-8
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Approach 1 - Create static websites using UTF-8
encoding in HTML
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Approach 2 array of strings used in your
application dynamic text display
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Approach 3 Using tables to store translated text
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Many permutations of the approaches exist
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Approach 4 Using gettext method similar to
GNOME
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PO files are structured text files containing a
msgid and msgstr for the strings in your
application
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Displaying text is very easy. Using the
underscore function - _(string)
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How does this work in real life?

• Gettext example

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PEAR has a handful of classes for I18N
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You can detect what languages are supported by
the browser and send appropriate version of
content
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Accepting input in different languages is easy
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MySQL can easily support UTF-8 data
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PHP5 makes it very easy to work with UTF-8
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There are many Open Source PHP packages with
multilingual support
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We have used most of these approaches, but find
gettext the best
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Resources

• Articles
• Ready Packages

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Queries?

• Thanks!
• Contact
• Nirav Mehta
• nirav_at_magnet-i.com