Create a webpage with Multilanguage in PHP

Question

I would like to develop a multilanguage page in PHP, for exemple english/german/japanese.. so when i click on german the page language will change to german, then i click en

Answer 1

Usually you'd need a UTF-8 enabled website. This is set via the header of the file. (and can be set via header()) function.

Then I'm guessing you want to have the site in English and Chinese. Then I'd recommend to have a language file. Perhaps an array or an object where you store the paragraphs you want to display on the site. And then you just print out that paragraph.

Then to know what language the user is asking for, I'd use $_SESSION to store the user's chosen language.

Then your language file could look like this

$lang["en"]["Welcome"] = "Welcome to the site";

And then the Chinese welcome file would have something like this

$lang["ch"]["Welcome"] = "歡迎";

Then in the location you want to print this out. You would do

echo $lang[$_SESSION["lang"]]["Welcome"];

Answer 2

One effective way of building multi-language websites is by not using hard coded labels but retrieving them from the appropriate language file, because basically what you need to do is to orient different users on your site. If you had data displayed which you store on a database maybe you should consider adding some database tables storing translations in different languages. To do some of the work in C# for example you can use Resource Files storing label values.

Answer 3

You can just type the content portion of your HTML in whatever character set you'd like. Just be sure to set the charset and content encoding properly. For example, set it to UTF-8 for simple unicode.

Answer 4

Rails handles it well. You might want to check it out for ideas on how to do this.