Dumb question: wtf with set_locale()?

vaaaska

When I look at the manual for this thing I just see a world of exceptions and ways to get various 'correct' results. My head spins and I just want to throw in the towel.

Unforunately, I need it...but how in the heck am I supposed to sniff out on folks computers whether they can use...

fr OR fr_FR OR fr_FR.utf8

Oh geez.

Any advice? I can't find any conclusive tutorials...which means it might be ripe for another PHPBuilder article if it's even possible.

Help!

And please don't tell me that PHP6 will take care of this because that's not today...

Weedpacket

The closest I can think is to use the request's "Accept-Language" and "Accept-Charset" headers, assuming they're present. Pick the options you support that have the highest "q" value.

vaaaska

As of PHP 4.3.x you can use multiple parameters with setlocale(). So, you can set the stage by allowing a user to pick their language (like 'English - GB') and then have the system basically guess which thing to pick:

// user pref stores 'en_gb' in the table - so ulimate you could have
$user_pref['lang'] = 'en_gb';

// part of a bigger list we'll presume
$lang['en_gb'] = array('en_GB.UTF-8', 'en_GB', 'en_UK', 'eng', 'en', 'english-uk');

// let's hope it works
$locale = setlocale(LC_ALL, $lang[$user_pref['lang']]);

Certainly, some kind of checks would need to be tossed in there, but oh well.

Ugh, messiness abounds.

Weedpacket

The ugliest part I see with setlocale() is the per-process thing - but that's only a problem if you're using a multithreaded server.

vaaaska

Weedpacket wrote:
The ugliest part I see with setlocale() is the per-process thing - but that's only a problem if you're using a multithreaded server.

Oh crap. Sigh...

Buuuuuuuuuuuut. I'm basically forcing a faux locale to get the localized strings through everything, I'm only using setlocale for date/time outputs.

If I could find a decent way of going around setlocale completely without creating a huge amount of extra work I'd do it. Anybody?

😉

Sxooter

vaaaska wrote:
Oh crap. Sigh...

Buuuuuuuuuuuut. I'm basically forcing a faux locale to get the localized strings through everything, I'm only using setlocale for date/time outputs.

If I could find a decent way of going around setlocale completely without creating a huge amount of extra work I'd do it. Anybody?

😉

Can you do it in the database level? I do all my date math in the database (db to be named at a later date) and I can use select timezonefield from table at timezone... to get what I need. Or is that different from what you're doing?