John Davidson

Message:

I set up PHP to use Gettext and translate my website /index.php based on the language.

Now I would like to have the URL different for each language ( example: mydomain.com/fr/ ). But each folder should point to the main directory and PHP will change the language depending from which URL the user is using ( mydomain.com/fr/ or mydomain.com/it/ ).

What is the best way to do it?

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My Answer:
One way to achieve this is to use URL rewriting in your web server configuration to redirect requests to the appropriate language folder. For example, in Apache, you can use mod_rewrite to rewrite the URLs.

Here is an example of how you can set up URL rewriting in your .htaccess file to redirect requests to the appropriate language folder:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^fr/(.*)$ /$1?lang=fr [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^it/(.*)$ /$1?lang=it [QSA,L]


In this example, requests to /fr/ will be redirected to the main directory with the lang parameter set to fr, and requests to /it/ will be redirected with the lang parameter set to it.

In your PHP code, you can then check the lang parameter in the query string to determine the language to use for translation. For example:

php
$lang = isset($_GET['lang']) ? $_GET['lang'] : 'en';
putenv("LC_ALL=$lang");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $lang);
bindtextdomain("messages", "./locale");
textdomain("messages");


This code sets the locale based on the lang parameter in the query string and loads the appropriate translation files from the locale directory.

With this setup, users can access your website using URLs like mydomain.com/fr/ or mydomain.com/it/, and the content will be translated based on the language specified in the URL.