Parametric string replacement

Feyd-Rautha

Hello!
I am developing a multilanguage site and I need an efficient way to handle the creation of complex statements that include data from the database. It would be easy to replace tags with "static" strings taken from the db or a language file, but my strings contain one or more parameters.
It will be clearer with an example 🙂

i will have a text like this: "some html ... @statement1756['Mickey', 'Pluto']@ ... more html"

now I need an efficient way to replace the statement for each supported language through a configuration file. Here we have two parameters, say $1 and $2
in english: statement1756="$2 is $1's dog."
in italian: statement1756="il cane di $1 è $2"
and so on

I've spent some time thinking about a solution but found nothing, could you help me please?

jim_keller

the FUSE application framework has support for setting "message keys" that allow replacement of parameters. Unless you're still in the early stages of development, it probably wouldn't make sense to switch to the framework now, but you can take some tips from how it works.

http://phpfuse.net/wiki/index.php?title=Message_Translation

Basically, you set up a file (in, say, include/messages/en_US/messages-blog.inc.php) with arrays that look like this:

$blog_messages['missing_id'] = 'The id of %1 is invalid';

then, you'd call the translate() method of the MessageTranslator class like this:

$translator->translate( "blog-missing_id %{$id}%", array('language' => 'en_US') );

and if your ID was 4, you'd get:

"The id 4 is invalid"

if you want to see the actual code, visit: http://svn.phpfuse.net/FUSE/trunk/support/Message/MessageTranslator.class.php

Weedpacket

Have a look at [man]sprintf[/man]. For your example, compare:

$english="%2s is %1s's dog.";
$italian="il cane di %1s &#232; %2s";

echo sprintf($english, 'Pluto', 'Mickey');
echo "\n";
echo sprintf($italian, 'Pluto', 'Mickey');