Include problems with PHP - php

Question

I need a little help! I'm making multilangual site with php and I got an issue. I want to include array into another array.
There is one php file
<?php
$lang = array(
'en' => array(
include ('translations/nav-translation/en.php');
),
'lv' => array(
include ('translations/nav-translation/lv.php');
),
);
?>
And php file that I want to include
<?php
"home" => "Home",
"blog" => "Blog",
"about" => "About me",
?>

Answer 1

If you don't want to use yaml it's better to return arrays from your lang files
en.php:
<?php
return ["home" => "Home",....]
?>
index.php:
<?php
$lang = array(
'en' => include("translations/nav-translation/en.php"),
'lv' => ....

Answer 2

Can't you just set up your include files like this:
translations/nav-translation/en.php
<?php
$lang['en'] = array(
"home" => "Home",
"blog" => "Blog",
"about" => "About me"
);
?>
And then:
<?php
$lang = array();
include ('translations/nav-translation/en.php');
include ('translations/nav-translation/lv.php');
?>
Seems a lot less complicated than any other suggestion.

Answer 3

To create a multilingual PHP site, I'd suggest using a function that checks the language the user has specified and then loading the text from a database or use JSON.
Using JSON
Create a file with a .txt extension, create your translations in JSON format and read it via PHP, to read the file in PHP use:
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($file),TRUE);
You can then use the JSON data to set variables within PHP to display the correct language.
Using a database
Have your database setup like this:
---------------------------
Lang | Short | Text
---------------------------
In your database, set up as many languages as you want, have the lang column the two-letter abbreviation of the language name, the short should be the name of the text, so if it was the home page title, name the short home-title and then the text should be the text that you want to be displayed in your desired language.
Using a database will allow you to add/edit languages and translations via the database.

Answer 4

$path = 'translations/nav-translation';
$user_lang = 'nl'; // determine what the user actually wants
$fallback_lang = 'en';
if (file_exists("{$path}/{$user_lang}.php")) {
include ("{$path}/{$user_lang}.php");
} else {
include ("{$path}/{$fallback_lang}.php"); // nominate a default
}
In the language files (e.g. translations/nav-translation/en.php), offer a fully formed associative array:
$lang = [
"home" => "Home",
"blog" => "Blog",
"about" => "About me"
];
Then, back in your original file after the conditional include call, you can reference $lang['home'] or [cringe] use extract()* to generate variables like $home.
*note, I have never, ever used extract() in any of my projects, there are risks in using it -- I'm just saying you could.