Multi language PHP application: best practice?

Question

I'd like to get your feedback over the way I implemented multi-language support on my PHP MVC web app. That's how I did:

• in the /app folder I created a /languages folder which contains one file per language (english.php, spanish.php, etc.)
  
• each file contains a serie of variables with the same names in each files, containing the texts to render in the views
  
• these variables are then echoed in the different views
  
• a "language" cookie variable is updated when the user changes the language
• in the controller of each view, I include a language file on the following format:
  

include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/app/languages/" . $_COOKIE["language"] . ".php";

Sounds pretty neat to me. Would you have any negative thoughts about this method?

Answer 1

As you're on PHP 5.3.2 I'd definitely recommend checking out the intl extension if you can. It's full of handy functions and classes to assist in i18n. For instance you can use the following snippet to generate a "best-fit" language for your visitor from those you have available:

$langs = array('en', 'fr', 'de');
$preferences = Locale::acceptFromHttp($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);
$locale = Locale::lookup($langs, $preferences);

There's also a lot more to think about than straight word-for-word replacements. Different languages have different formatting conventions. There's a lot of information in this Zend article that might prove useful.

My code uses XSL for templating so personally, when it comes to translations I use XML language files and XPath queries so that the language file can be understood directly by templates but is also available to PHP for formatting strings with MessageFormatter.

I'd avoid using the database as a store to be honest, simply for performance.