news engine with different languages??

marhaena

Hi guys,

I need some help... I want to make news engine that supports several languages, but I'm not very familiar with the logic... Do I have to code in a special way in order to support the languages at the time of data updating? How about the database, does mysql support different languages?

Thx,
Marhaena

planetsim

I wouldnt have a clue.. But i think you can do it.. You may need like thing in your queries that change the language.. But im not exactly sure...

pinkbike

This is a very wide subject

1) I just want to have mutiple languages (character sets) on my page.

Simple answer - user UTF-8 or other unicode to encode your pages

2) I want to have my page display with different language strings
Simple answer - use babelfish to just encode your page
next answer - generate static strings on your site from a language file which has strings in multiple languages. Select the language file nased on user data

3) I want to have a full multilingual site
Simple Answer - this is a very complicated task for a beginner. Try the above first and you will then have more questions that will eventually lead you to the full solution

Ramsey_Nasser

just how multilingual is PHP/MySQL? i mean for displaying non-latin based languages (japanese, chinese, arabic etc). PHP will probably display what ever you give it, but can you store, for example, arabic text in a MySQL database?

pinkbike

Originally posted by Ramsey Nasser
just how multilingual is PHP/MySQL? i mean for displaying non-latin based languages (japanese, chinese, arabic etc). PHP will probably display what ever you give it, but can you store, for example, arabic text in a MySQL database?

PHP has the ability to work with multibyte characters.

Mysql does not have Multibyte support but this does not prevent you from storing "multibyte data" in it. You can store any bytes in the db...what they represent does not matter. For example I store ALL my string and language translation data in UTF8 (multibyte) in mysql. I write this data in and read it out....sure mysql does not know what it is or it gets confused it you try to do
"text" processing functions on the data, but there is nothing stopping you from storing and reading from the data. You can even do searches successfully as long as you search for this "byte stream" and don't ask the DB to figure out word spaces, and case sensitivity, and things like that.