PHP - link for actual language id - php

Question

So I'm building a small multilingual (French + English) website and there is a little bug. I would like to remove the "english default" language in the code, so if a user picks french on one page, any page he will select afterwards will be in french and not be "back" to english. Same if the user picks english in the first place. But since there will be more french users, I would like it to be the default language on the home page.
The content is in folder with prefixes: fr_language.php and en_language.php
The lang.php file here
Links for FR or EN
Français
English
And the navigation
<ul>
<li><?php echo $lang['home']; ?></li>
<li><?php echo $lang['services']; ?></li>
<li><?php echo $lang['aboutus']; ?></li>
<li><?php echo $lang['contact']; ?></li>
</ul>
Thanks for your help!
EDIT:
Ok great, with your help it's working! In my "nav.php" include, I wrote this. Perhaps it's possible to do a cleaner version, haha! Any ideas? Thanks again!

Answer 1

Consider using the following approach/method:
if(isset($_GET['lang']) && $_GET['lang'] == "fr"){
// do something
} else {
// do something else
}
You should also be made aware of (XSS) Cross-site scripting.
Here are a few links to read up on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
http://www.sitepoint.com/php-security-cross-site-scripting-attacks-xss/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/11/keeping-web-users-safe-by-sanitizing-input-data/
You can further your research by using "XSS injection php" as keywords in your favorite search engine.

Answer 2

you need to keep the state of the language somewhere.
you will either have to pass it around with each request by
url parameter: page.php?lang=en
path: yourpage.com/en/page.php
or use a cookie to store it. you will get the cookie value passed with each server request
you can read the cookie through the $_COOKIE var. you can set it either in javascript or php

Answer 3

Personally, I recommend an on click for your language selector that will create a new PHP session and store the language.
The benefit of doing it this way is that you don't always have to have your language appended to the end of your URL. This will only happen each time a session has to be created, (so if you don't set a timeout then only when the computer restarts). Once the page redirects from the page that sets the language it doesn't have to $_GET anymore, but rather just check for an active session.
You will have to redirect the user to the page that has your PHP script and then set the language based on the what is sent in the URL. You could however, redirect after the script finishes back to the page the user was on (and load their new selected language).
HTML:
Français
English
PHP:
// intitially set language by your selector
<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION['language'] = $_GET['lang'];
?>
Now you could place your getter code on any page that gets included on all your pages (like a header or base page):
// check for the language
<?php
session_start();
if (isset($_SESSION['language'])) {
// now change the language of the page based on what it is
if ($_SESSION['language'] == "en") {
// change page language to english
} else {
// change page language to french
}
}
?>

Answer 4

It looks like you are using you are using a function called get_lang_id() to pull from the cookie and use that to load the language file.
The get_lang_id() function is currently defaulting to English:
function get_lang_id()
{
return ( isset( $_COOKIE['lang'] ) &&
strlen( $_COOKIE['lang'] ) == 2 &&
is_language_supported( $_COOKIE['lang'] ) ) ?
htmlspecialchars($_COOKIE['lang']) : 'en';
}
If you change the 'en' at the end to 'fr', it will change the default language file to the French version. Clicking either link will set a cookie, which will skip using the default.