Localizing PHP Applications "The right way" with gettext

[Aleksejs]

Pamācība piecās daļās kā veidot lokalizējamu PHP aplikāciju:

Pirmā daļa

When it comes to localizing your PHP application, you may have a lot of options at your disposal. We chose to use the GNU gettext library and its PHP extension, a powerful and easy approach that localizes the application “The right way!” In this installment you saw what’s needed to install gettext and the PHP extension, briefly used Poedit, and whetted your appetite with a simple Hello World script.

 

Otrā daļa

In this part you learned what each function call does in the Hello World script introduced in Part 1. In terms of its API, gettext isn’t really a large library. There are only a handful of functions, most of which you will only use once in your entire application. The most frequently used will be gettext(), or it’s shorthand alias _(), and its plural form equivalent ngettext(). You also learned how to target multiple Locales (en_US and fr_FR in our example), and how gettext falls back to the msgid when its missing a translation.

 

Trešā daļa

In this part you learned how using the default locale’s strings as msgids in target domains can improve performance and organization, and how switching between locales based on the user’s preference can be accomplished. You also learned that while gettext allows only one default lookup domain, you can use multiple domains with dgettext() provided you’ve bound them first.

 

Ceturtā daļa

In this part of the localization series you saw one of the most powerful features of gettext. Programmers who may try to write their own inline if statements each time they need to present a pluralized message will soon find the approach cumbersome and fragile. Gettext abstracts the logic so you can keep your code clean. All you need to do is determine the correct expression to calculate the plural forms index for each language you translate, provide the msgid and msgid_plural pair and then a set of indexed msgstrs that gettext can choose from and gettext takes care of the rest.

 

Piektā daļa

In this last part of the series, you learned how to extract translation strings automatically from your PHP source files using the xgettext tool, generating a PO template file. The template can then be used for generating any target domain catalogs you need, thus leaving the cumbersome process of messages extraction to the computer.

 

Throughout the five parts you’ve learned how localization can be just a matter of writing separate translation files for a target locale, and then referenced using gettext(), its shorthand alias _(), and its plural counterpart ngettext(). You’ve also seen how taking advantage of gettext’s fallback behavior can lead to more readable code and translation catalogs, and how translations can be neatly organized into their own domains (messages.po for general messages, errors.po for error strings, etc.).