在PHP webapp中模板化不同的语言

Question

I'm writing a webapp in german, so all buttons,text,tooltips etc. are in german for now. But I want to use some kind of template file for the webapp so I can quick change to another language if needed. I thought about textfile that I explode with " " and load into a sessionvariable to have always all text the user will need in his session. An other approach would be to parse such a file i.e. a XML document like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<phrase>
    <placeholder></placeholder>
    <value></value>
</phrase>

where every field has it's own name/value that represents a textsnippet or button or whatever on the website, and then cast it into an object an cache it for everyone. I think the second approach is the best for working with multiple languages for a webapp. Anybody perhaps some pointers what I could do even better, or just post how you did this kind of languagetemplating for mutlinational webpages/webapps in the past.

Answer 1

Since you are looking for a translation solution, I understand you don't use a framework to develop your site, since most of them provide you with solutions to handle translations.

Most frameworks and apps I've seen in php use arrays, where the original sentence is the key and the translation is the value. So, to make easier to translate it to several languages, the key is in english.

In case you use gettext as suggested, or another aproach, it'll be useful also to parse your code to catch all strings to be translated automatically, since it can be a mess doing it manually when the base code grows and you want to keep up to date your translations.