Codeigniter urls in multiple languages but handled by the same controller

Question

Let's say I would like to list products on a codeigniter project and support multiple languages, so that someone would select english and get the url example.com/products/5 where 5 is the page number, and someone else would select italian and go get example.com/prodotti/5 . Behind the scenes, I want to have a controller that gets passed a language parameter and a page number parameter to handle these requests. I have a small number of situations like this, and I was thinking about creating two controllers named products and prodotti and then calling a third controller from each one of them by giving it the parameters that it needs.

Is there a better way? Is this achievable with routes?

Answer 1

Here's how I've solved it:

application/config/routes.php

$route['products/(.*)'] = 'products/en/$1';
$route['prodotti/(.*)'] = 'products/it/$1';

application/controllers/products.php

<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Products extends CI_Controller {

    public function index($lang, $nr)
    {
        echo 'lang: ', $lang, ' nr: ',$nr;
    }

    // https://gist.github.com/1096571
    function _remap($method)
    {
        $param_offset = 2;

        if ( ! method_exists($this, $method))
        {
            $param_offset = 1;
            $method = 'index';
        }

        $params = array_slice($this->uri->rsegment_array(), $param_offset);

        call_user_func_array(array($this, $method), $params);
    }
}