the best way for including text content in different languages?

Fking

i'm building a site in 3 languages, i plan it to be with only one page for the design, and the text content to be included dinamicly, that's why i will need the variable which says which language to use to be passed to every page.

I'm a newbie in php, and i can figure out only this way:

a link on the choose language page like, <a href="somepage.php?lang=en>

and all links on all page to be like <a href="anypage.php?lang=<? echo "$lang"?>

i believe there should be a better way?

bubblenut

Sessions
Use a link with the laguage reference in the url for the user to select the language and then store their selection in a session variable.

Weedpacket

As well as using a session (and/or a persistent cookie if you want the user's selection to last across sessions) - and you're using Apache as your web server, you can use [man]apache_request_headers[/man] to find out the user's default preference (assuming their client sends an Accept-Language: header). That way, if you support their first choice of language, they won't need to do anything to get your site in their chosen language.

I think the order in which to check would be: (1) session; If that's not present, (2) a cookie (and optionally set the session to match what you find in the cookie); failing that (typically because the user has yet to indicate a choice) (3) the Accept-Language: header (just use the first language in the supplied list that you support); failing that (4) English (because that is the language shared by the largest number of Internet users).

For ease of portability (and particularly for handling step (3) above) it would probably be a good idea to use the standard two-letter language identifiers ISO 639 to identify the language in use.