How to make multiple language website with including appropriate files on PHP?

Question

I have 2 languages in my website. I want to include appropriate file according to selected language. For example, <a href='index.php?lang=en'>English</a> and <a href='index.php?lang=tr'>Turkish</a>. If user clicks over first hyperlink (English) I want to display this information (with HTML tags):

<h1>Hello</h1>
How are you

Otherwise:

<h1>Selam</h1>
Nasılsın

I also dont want user selected language to change if user go to other page inside website.

How can I do that?

Answer 1

You could use .ini files to hold the translated versions of you text for example, en.ini will contain:

hello    = "Hello"
greeting = "How are you"

While tr.ini will contain:

hello    = "Selam"
greeting = "Nasılsın"

Both are simple text files (saved in UTF-8 format). Now you can see that the strings have common names in all languages (hello & greeting) which cab be used in the code like this:

// First, load the appropriate language file:

$lang = "en";
$strings = parse_ini_file( "$lang.ini" );

// Now we can use the following code no matter what $lang indicates (tr or en):

echo( "<h1>{$strings[ "hello" ]}</h1><br/>{$strings[ "greeting" ]}" );

One thing you should be concious of:

• Since parse_ini_file reads a file from the file system, you must validate the value in $lang very carefully! don't rely on user input in any way for the value of $lang as it might be malicious (link to page.php?lang=en is not good enough). Check the value of $lang against your own white list for example: $langs = array( "en", "tr" ); and if that fails, redirect to a general error page or something...

Answer 2

The best solution for you is named Gettext

See :
PHP manual Gettext
Localizing PHP web sites using gettext

This is, without any discussion, the best way to have a multi language web site. Gettext is faster than any other solution.

Answer 3

I guess the best way to map all your words in the database , detect which language is , after that retrieve all the data from the database by mapping the language ID (EN for English and TU for Turkish) and the specified word..You can use "If , else" for the same approach ...