CakePHP Localization issue

Question

I follow the cakePHP book to config the i18n and l10n of my site. Suppose I have English, Spanish, German.

Browsers usually have a list of languages ordered by priority. If at the first position of the list appears a language that is configured on my site all works fine. But if, for example, the list is this: French, German, Spanish, English; localization fails and shows the i18n identifiers that I used in my code.

I would like that in this case the page appears translated in German, because in the list is the first language that my site can provide. This would be the perfect solution but at least I would like that I can configure a default language (for example, English) if the first language of the browser list is unknown by my page.

What I can do to achieve this and where should put the code?

Thank you in advance.

If you look into the i18n table, are there entries for the other languages? Did you save the values for all the different languages? Also, CakePHP has another method for 'localization', namely the __() function, I think you mean Translation — Katai
check routing and add english as default if there is no language in url Router::connect — Pramendra Gupta
@Katai, I'm noob in this things, what is the i18n table? I use the __() function in my code to define things to be translated, then I create the .pot and one .po file by language. Then simply the application do the l10n automatically if the first browser language is defined. The first code modification I did is explained in the answer I post a few minutes ago. — dgnin
@JapanPro, I'm not using urls like en.<url>.com, I simply want that language be identified by browser configuration. — dgnin
@davidgnin That's what confused me - the l18n table is for translation, the __() for localisation. You'll have to extract all 'Strings' inside the __() over the console, and then you get the .pot / .po files. there, you need an editor for them, like poedit.net - with that, you can create different langauge .po / .mo files - see my answer for details — Katai

dgnin dgnin · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-07T12:15:33

Well, I did the next in app/Config/bootstrap.php:

$browserLangs = explode(',',$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);
$find = 'eng';
foreach($browserLangs as $browserLang) {
    $lang = substr($browserLang,0,2);
    var_dump($lang);
    if ($lang == 'en') {
        $find = 'eng';
        break;
    } else if ($lang == 'es') {
        $find = 'spa';
        break;
    } else if ($lang == 'ca') {
        $find = 'cat';
        break;
    }
}
Configure::write('Config.language', $find);

In Accept Language header we have a string with all the list of languages of the browser. Then I define English as default, and try to find other language in the list, breaking the bucle when I get one.

I put this as an answer because it works, but its dirty because:

I don't know if this is the best way and the best place,
this is very static, you have to put the languages one by one and when you add another language you have to update the algorithm. The best solution will check automatically for the locales defined on the cake application, which I don't know how to ask for.
Perhaps this code should be defined as a plugin, component or something like that.

Perhaps someone can improve this or post another better solution as a new answer.

CakePHP Localization issue

2 Answers