Language "switch" or Auto "URL REPLACE" in a link

MinusG

Hello. I’m new to PHP and I have a little question.

I’m building a website with both ENGLISH and FRENCH side. Both sides are a "mirror" of each other. By that I mean that all the pages a placed at the same place. For example:

www.MySite.com/english/contact/index.html
www.MySite.com/french/contact/index.html

What I would like to achieved is to have a "French Version" or "English version" button, depending on the side you’re on. What I would like to do, if it’s possible, is to have the script check the current URL and simply replace the "/english" part by "/french" and vice versa, of the button’s link.

I currently use a JavaScript that does something like it; the problem is that the link cannot be seen by search engine.

Any idea?

etully

In any PHP script, you can see what path the user was using when they arrived at your page by looking at the SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] variable. For example, in your index.html file (which you should probably rename to index.php), the variable would have this value:

/english/contact/index.html
or
/french/contact/index.html

With regular expressions, you can examine that variable to see what language is currently being displayed and display a link to the other language like this:

preg_match("/^\/([^\/]+)\/(.+)$/",$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],$regs);
$language = $regs[1];
$page = $regs[2];
if ($language=="french") { $other_language = "english"; }
if ($language=="english") { $other_language = "french"; }
echo "<a href=\"/".$other_language."/".$page."\">";
echo "<img src=\"/images/".$other_language."-button.gif\" border=0></a>";

MinusG

Thank you, it works like a charm!

Compare to what I had using JavaScript, this is so much cleaner.