Gettext placeholders

5
votes

I am building a multilingual application in PHP + CodeIgniter. I have settled upon using gettext for UI text translation, and so far it has proven efficient and easy to work with.

But now I am facing something really annoying: the gettext() function only accepts one parametre, while I'd like a printf-like behaviour that I get from Zend Framework's gettext adapter, where I can use %1$s, %2$s etc. as placeholders and then specify the replacement strings as additional parametres to Zend view's translate() function.

I do not wish to ditch gettext due to the easy translation management with .po files and poEdit (I can get it updated with a single click, after all). What are my options?

I have already tried writing a helper to interact with gettext: run the first argument through gettext and then run strtr on the resulting string. Are there any other/better approaches you would recommend?

1
phpinternationalizationgettextplaceholder
I do realize that you said you don't want to ditch gettext, but you should be aware that you can use Zend_Translate and CI together without too much trouble. The manual says that it can read .mo files. I'm not sure how those differ from .po files, thus the reason why I'm posting this as a comment instead of an answer. The manual does say that "POEdit" works with that format. – Charles
.mo is what .po becomes after it's compiled. Gettext reads .mo, but .po is human-readable and that's what you edit :). Yes, using Zend_Translate is definitely an option to consider. – mingos

1 Answers

6
votes

It's quite simple actually, you define a variadic function like this:

function myGettext($id)
{
    return vsprintf(gettext($id), array_slice(func_get_args(), 1));
}

Now doing myGettext('%u %s in a %s', 3, 'monkeys', 'tree') will return the expected string with the placeholders replaced by the remaining arguments. You obviously also need to implement a plural aware function that calls ngettext() instead.

Regarding poEdit, you have to modify the keywords it searches for, it's been a while since I last used it but it was quite simple, the only problem I faced was identifying keywords for plural support (see this).

Hope it helps!