Re: languages and PHP

Per Jessen wrote:
David Christopher Zentgraf wrote:

Your biggest problem will be if you accept any kind of user input
which could be in any kind of language.
Depending on your server configuration you'll probably have some
serious cleaning and filtering to do.
I often have to employ this line for example:
foreach (array_keys($_POST) as $key) $clean[$key] =
mb_convert_encoding($_POST[$key], "UTF-8");

Trying to make sure that you'll receive UTF-8 helps as well:
<form action="form.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"
accept-charset="utf-8">

I work almost exclusively in UTF-8 (language irrelevant), but I've never
had to do any of the above. The mb_convert_encoding() from UTF-8 to
UTF-8 doesn't seem to make much sense?

I agree. Provided you HTML is dished out with UTF-8 in the doctype
definiton etc. then all forms are automatically sent in UTF-8....

Also for multilingual content (labels etc.) in PHP have a look at the
gettext extension. This will let you code in your default language with
a minimal wrapper and translate to other languages with catalog files.

Be careful about breaking strings tho' as the xgettext crawler file will
not be able to extract strings properly. Also do not use variable
substituion but rather use printf/sprintf e.g.:
$var = sprintf(_('Here is %d example of a translatable string.'), 1);

That way the string you translate is nice and standard.(here _() is the
name of the gettext function which is quite common).

You may leave this up to your templating engine (e.g. no labels in
code), so it may not matter.

Also if you are writing modular code, ensure you think about the gettext
domains first and you'll probably want to pass the domain in with
*every* string in your system to ensure it's modular design (e.g. each
module has it's own gettext domain). If you want a good example of
modular gettext usage, I'd recommend looking at the source of gallery2.

HTH.

Col
.

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