Can't get gettext (php) on Ubuntu working

Question

The following example works on Mac OS X with Apache, i.e. I get the translated string echoed back. But on Ubuntu with lighttpd I get the original text 'Inactive account'. I've tried all sorts of combinations of environment varialbes without any luck. It's not file permissions either because I can echo out the contents of the .mo file.

<?php

//$locale = 'sv_SE.UTF-8';
$locale = 'sv_SE';

$dir = dirname(__FILE__);

// File permission is apparantly not a problem as this works...
//echo file_get_contents($dir . '/sv_SE/LC_MESSAGES/flattr.mo');

putenv("LANG=$locale");
putenv("LANGUAGE=$locale");
putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
putenv("LC_MESSAGES=$locale");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, $locale);
//setlocale(LANG, $locale);
//setlocale(LANGUAGE, $locale);

bindtextdomain('flattr', $dir);
//bind_textdomain_codeset("flattr", 'UTF-8');
textdomain('flattr');

echo _("Inactive account");

?>

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

I was facing the same problem. I'll describe the things I did to fix it on Ubuntu 10.10.

1) make sure you have 'gettext' installed,

sudo apt-get install gettext

Alternatively, you can install 'php-gettext' if 'gettext' cannot be installed. The package 'php-gettext' is not required if you already have 'gettext' installed.

2) Then generate the locale for your language. In this example I'll use 'sv_SE'. Look up the supported locales in '/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED',

less /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

You'll find multiple lines that start with 'sv_SE',

sv_SE.UTF-8 UTF-8
sv_SE ISO-8859-1
sv_SE.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15

This means you have multiple options for generating the locale for sv_SE. One of the options does not have a period (.) in its name (i.e. sv_SE ISO-8859-1); this is the default character set for that locale. To generate the locale for the default character set, run the following command,

sudo locale-gen sv_SE

If you want to generate that locale for the UTF-8 character set, run this command,

sudo locale-gen sv_SE.UTF-8

Restart Apache after generating locales (it won't find the newly generated locales otherwise),

sudo service apache2 restart

3) Finally, update your PHP script to match the locale you generated. If you generated the locale for 'sv_SE',

setlocale(LC_ALL, "sv_SE");

But if you generated the UTF-8 equivalent of that locale, use,

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

All should work now.

Answer 2

Though I followed the steps outlined in the accepted answer, I couldn't get it to work on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I had to do two important things:

(1) Before generating the messages.mo file, I had to specify in message.po explicitly UTF-8 for charset:

msgid   ""
msgstr  "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
        "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
        "POT-Creation-Date: 2016-12-19 16:28+0530\n"
        "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
        "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
        "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
        "Language: \n"
        "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
        "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"    <---------change here
        "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

(2) I had to maintain same folder name as the locale installed. For instance, I installed Kannada by running sudo locale-gen kn_IN. This generated kn_IN.UTF-8. Note the capital letters and hyphen in UTF-8. I used this same name while setting locale in my php script and for the folder name where I put the messages.mo file:

PHP Script:

// I18N support information
$locale = "kn_IN.UTF-8";       <----------change here
putenv("LANG=".$locale); 
putenv("LC_ALL=".$locale);
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);

$domain = 'messages';
bindtextdomain($domain, "./Locale");
bind_textdomain_codeset($domain, 'UTF-8');
textdomain($domain);

Folder Name:

project_folder
    /Locale
        /kn_IN.UTF-8      <------change here
            /LC_MESSAGES
                /messages.mo

Ubuntu is case sensitive to folder and file names. So make sure the capital letters are maintained as shown above.