[RESOLVED] Localisation Problem with setlocale, gettext, etc

neilljones

Hi all,

I have a problem with getting gettext to work properly in PHP. Has anyone got it working using setlocale, bindtextdomain etc. Here is what I have tried so far ...

I am setting the locale from the default en_GB to another (here en_IE as it is definately installed on my machine as locale -a proves) as the page loads

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_IE');
echo "locale is ".setlocale(LC_MESSAGES,0));
bindtextdomain('messages', '/opt/myproj/locale');
textdomain('messages');

The echo returns en_IE as expected.

Inside /opt/myproj/locale I have
en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/messages.mo
en_IE/LC_MESSAGES/messages.mo
and neither are the same as the default text so that I can see if they are loaded.

The problem is this
1) If I set the locale to something unsupported, it finds the default text as expected 🙂
2) If I set the locale to en_GB, it finds the en_GB text as expected 🙂
3) If I set the locale to en_IE, it FAILS to find the en_IE text, but instead
displays the default text. :mad:

I am testing this on the same machine that is the web server, and am restarting the
webserver, and the browser in between changes. I am using LAMPP for apache
mysql and php, and it is compiled to use gettext (as tests 1&2 prove).

From everything I have read, this is the "correct" way to do it, but it still fails in
the third case.

Has anyone any idea what might be going wrong?

Thanks for any help, very much appreciated.

Neill

NogDog

I'm not too familiar with this stuff, but one silly thought that popped into my mind is that maybe there's a difference in the permissions between the two directories and/or the files in them?

neilljones

Hi Nogdog

Not a silly thought at all as most problems are permissions. Alas not in this case - they are all the same.

Neill

neilljones

Ok, found the solution - the server had the LANGUAGE variable set, and gettext will look at LANGUAGE before LC_ALL or LC_MESSAGES, so was picking up the wrong value. Solutions are either to unset LANGUAGE on the server (fine if you are allowed to do that) or set it to the locale required. If you use setlocale first to determine which one of the browser's multiple accepted languages is supported, and then use the selected one to set the LANGUAGE env variable, then it should work.

Here is a function that can be used to set the locale, at least for Mandriva 2007 using LAMPP. It checks to see if the browser has returned a value (otherwise defaults to no translation) and if so, then changes the returned values from en-gb etc to en_GB which is what setlocale will accept. Haven't tested this out on browsers coming from a windows environment so maybe more manipulations are needed (?). Then the function uses setlocale to find which value is accepted, and sets the language environment variable to that.

[FONT=Courier New]
set_locale()
{
$locale = null; // default value is "reset"
if (isset($SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']) && $SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] != '') {
$locale = split(",", $SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);
foreach ($locale as &$loc) {
$loc = preg_replace(array('/-/','/;.*/'),array('',''), $loc); // remove the q=0.x fields and replace "-" with ""
$temp = split('', $loc);
$loc = $temp[0].(isset($temp[1])&&($temp[1]!='')?'_'.strtoupper($temp[1]):'');
}
}
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
bindtextdomain('messages', '/opt/whosUp4/promotionSite/locale');
textdomain('messages');
// and finally tell it to use the LANGUAGE setting of choice
putenv("LANGUAGE=".setlocale(LC_ALL,0));
}
[/FONT]

HTH anyone with a similar problem

Neill