PHP gettext on Windows

Question

There's some tutorials out there for gettext (w/ Poedit)... unfortunately, it's mostly for a UNIX environment. And even more unfortunate is that I am running my WAMP server on Windows XP (but I am developing for a UNIX environment) and none of the tutorials can get gettext working properly for me. From the man page (http://us3.php.net/manual/en/book.gettext.php), it appears that it's a different process on a Windows environment. I've tried out some of the solutions in the comments but I still can't get it to work! Please, I've spent many hours on this, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction to get this thing to work! (and I'm sure there are others out there who share my frustration). So far with my setup, I'm only getting output "Hello World!" whereas I should be getting the translated string.

Here is my setup/code so far:

<?php
// test.php
if (!defined('LC_MESSAGES')) {
    define('LC_MESSAGES', 6);

}
$locale = "deu_DEU"; // apparently the locales are different on a WINDOWS platform

putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
bindtextdomain("greetings", ".\locale");
textdomain("greetings");


echo _("Hello World"); 

?>

Folder structure

root:     C:\Program Files\WampServer 2\www
test.php: C:\Program Files\WampServer 2\www\site
.po:      C:\Program Files\WampServer 2\www\site\locale\deu_DEU\LC_MESSAGES\greetings.po
.mo:      C:\Program Files\WampServer 2\www\site\locale\deu_DEU\LC_MESSAGES\greetings.mo

Please advise! Thanks for your time :)

Answer 1

It was because I didn't have the locales installed.

Answer 2

I ran into problems while working with gettext on my local machine, and after some search i found this page which solved my problem: http://www.kipras.com/getting-gettext-to-work-in-apache-on-windows/96

I am quoting from the web page:

On Linux servers (or any other servers apart windows), the way to do it is this:

setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, “en_US”);

The correct way to set locality on windows is this:

putenv(“LC_ALL=en_US”);

Answer 3

I had the same problem, and wasted almost a day or so on it. Finally, I found a very simple solution, namely to uninstall WAMP Server (version 2.1), and install a newer version (WampServer 2.1e - 32 bits). It's strange, but it solved the problem completely.

Here is the sample code that worked for me:

<?php

    $locale = "deu_DEU";

    putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
    setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);

    bindtextdomain("greetings", "./locale");
    textdomain("greetings");

    echo _("Hello World");

?>

Hope it helps.

Answer 4

I didn't made a full investigation on this but I'm sure that one of your mistakes is that you used invalid locale codes - even on Windows the locales codes are the same - these are gettext locales and they are cross platform.

Please try to use just "de" as locale code, it should work. Also be sure that your PHP has gettext extension installed and activated (check with phpinfo).

Answer 5

Might be too late but I was having similar issues until I enabled "short open tag" in my WAMP php settings

Answer 6

This is the solution that worked for me. This works on the latest wampserver. (source: http://www.extradrm.com/blog/?p=1035 )

1) Download php-gettext from here: https://launchpad.net/php-gettext/+download and unzip it

2) Add the following files found in the package root in the same folder as test-language.php : - gettext.inc - gettext.php - streams.php

3) Open your php.ini and comment out wampserver php_gettext.dll:

;extension=php_gettext.dll

4) This is the new test file test-language.php

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);

// define constants
define('PROJECT_DIR', realpath('./'));
define('LOCALE_DIR', 'C:/wamp/www/test/locale');
define('DEFAULT_LOCALE', 'es_ES');

require_once('gettext.inc');

$supported_locales = array('en_US', 'sr_CS', 'de_CH','es_ES');
$encoding = 'UTF-8';

$locale = (isset($_GET['lang']))? $_GET['lang'] : DEFAULT_LOCALE;

//var_dump($locale);die();

// gettext setup
T_setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, $locale);
// Set the text domain as 'messages'
$domain = 'messages';
bindtextdomain($domain, LOCALE_DIR);
// bind_textdomain_codeset is supported only in PHP 4.2.0+
if (function_exists('bind_textdomain_codeset'))
bind_textdomain_codeset($domain, $encoding);
textdomain($domain);

echo gettext("HELLO_WORLD");
?>

After all of this you must create locale folder, en_US ( or other language ) folder, LC_MESSAGES folder and then put the messages.po file.