Otto Wyss wrote: > Paul Novitski wrote: > > I formulated my question in general since I couldn't find an other > message here about supporting multiple languages. > >> http://www.w3.org/International/articles/ >> >> http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-lang/ >> >> http://php.net/setlocale >> > Thanks a lot, these are good points for reading. >> >> 1) Switching language downloads a new version of the current page, >> generally with the same markup but new text. Example: >> http://partcon.ca/ >> > I'll favor this way especially if several languages have to be provided. > >> In both cases I store the text in database tables that contain a >> language field I can select on to match the user's request. >> > I wonder if retrieving static texts from the database draws too much > performance. I know from somebody who stores texts in large data arrays > an uses shared memory, yet I haven't figured it out how. > > I consider storing static texts as defines and just load a different > definition file when the user switches language. Is this practical? don't go down the define('LANG_KEY', 'lang string value'); route - defines are comparatively SLOW to create. IF you go down the road of loading in text from 'per lang' files I would suggest using an array as the storage mechanism: $Lang = array( 'LANG_KEY' => 'lang string value', // .. etc ); assoc array are much less heavy to create. also consider that there are, imho, 2 kinds of language specific data: 1. 'static' values - button texts, [error] messages - these are specified during site/application design. 2. 'dynamic' values - document titles, headers, content - these are specified by the owner/user during the lifetime of the site/application for the rest I'll just say 'ditto' to most of what the other list members replied :-) > > O. Wyss > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
