用于翻译内容的PHP代码段。 这是一个好习惯吗？ 可以变得更好/更简单吗？

Question

I am currently developing a website that will have translated content served by different gTLD. (example.com, example.fr, example.de)

The idea is to have them all redirect to the same content on the same server, and based on the gTLD, have a simple php routine that serves the correct language.

Here is the code I am using to detect the domain/language:

<?php

$url_tld = explode("." , $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] , 3);
if ($url_tld[2] == "fr") { $language = "FR"; $lang_id = 1;}
elseif ($url_tld[2] == "de") { $language = "DE"; $lang_id = 2;}
elseif ($url_tld[2] == "nl") { $language = "NL"; $lang_id = 3;}
else { $language = "EN"; $lang_id = 0;}

function txt($x) {
    global $lang_id;
    echo $x[$lang_id];
};

In the html code I run txt function whenever I need different language content; example:

<h1><?=txt(['Hello World','Bonjour France','Hallo Deutschland','Hallo Nederland'])?></h1>

I am trying to avoid using any database as the website will be mostly static.

Can this approach get simpler? Or more eye friendly (for those updating code manually)?

Best regards and thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I don't like the 3 in your explode() and the 2's in your indexes. What is it based on? What if the domain is example.co.uk or www.example.fr? Better use:

$domainExtension = end(explode(".",$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']));

Then you can do:

switch ($domainExtension) {
  case 'fr' : $language = 'FRE'; break;
  case 'de' : $language = 'GER'; break;
  case 'nl' : $language = 'DUT'; break;
  default   : $language = 'ENG'; break;
}

As you can see the switch () makes the code more readable. I don't abbreviate unnecessarily, for better readability. I also used the official three-letter abbreviation for languages. It's a bit more versatile, but two letters will do, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes

Personally I don't like numbers for languages, that's why I left them out, although I understand why you used them. You can do:

$texts = ['hello','Bonjour','Guten Tag','Hallo'];

but in that case you cannot leave out any languages. I would forget the numbers and do:

$texts = ['ENG' => 'hello',
          'FRE' => 'Bonjour',
          'GER' => 'Guten Tag',
          'DUT' => 'Hallo'];

Then, when a language is missing, you can replace it by another:

function getText($language,$texts) {
  if (isset($texts[$language]) return $texts[$language];  // it is there
                          else return reset($texts);      // take the first
};

You can then also sort the languages from most commonly used to rarely used. Note that I don't use a global, which is on purpose. Again, you can choose to use one.

Finally, to get back to the simpler list of texts you could use another function:

function setTexts($english,$french,$german,$dutch)
{
  return ['ENG' => $english,
          'FRE' => $french,
          'GER' => $german,
          'DUT' => $dutch];
}

$helloTexts = setTexts('hello','Bonjour','Guten Tag','Hallo');

and then used like this:

echo getText($language,$helloTexts);

But I have to stress that there are many other ways of doing this. You could, for instance, have separate include files for the various languages. That way you don't process any texts that aren't used. It might save a bit of time, but it will be minimal, and it is nice to keep the different translations of the same piece of text together.

One last tip: The broswer can tell you the preferred language of the visitor. See: $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'].