Change “en-US” to “en”

Question

Hey I am trying to edit the WP theme files, and I am using bloginfo('language') to get the language of the page.

However, it returns me "en-US", which does not work while redirect the page. The site I am working on only accept "/?lang=en".

I have tried to use if statement to specify the solution under different situations, but it failed, it seems the theme used a complex loop method, a slightly change will make the functions does not work.

So could I ask if there is an alternative way to transfer "en-US" to "en", or get "en" directly from the browser?

Thank you.

Answer 1

If you want to get the language of the browser do so:

$lang = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], 0, 2);

If you want to redirect to ?lang=en:

header("location: {$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}?lang={$lang}");

You should read about HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGAUGE.

There are many ways you can dance with languages but you should understand some key points.

1. Chose the default language of your website (French in your case)
2. The user may be French but his OS & Browser can be in English because he wants to learn the language of trade.
3. Create a cookie that stores the selected (or default) language so that you know what content to display. $_COOKIE["wpse_166976_lang"] = "fr" or $_COOKIE["wpse_166976_lang"] = $land where $lang = get_query_var("lang")

To get the language with WPML plugin, you could use ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE to get the language of the page