Create a multilingual site - php

Question

I start today in creating a multi-language system for my site.
To do so I created my two language files then created my switch that here below:
link
To call the file I created simple links
<p>EnglishFrançais</p>
When I'm on the home page and I click on "English" translation that do well but if I click on another link to my site I automatically revert to French when I should remain in English!
How can I fix this problem?

Answer 1

Your problem is that you always read the GET variable for language and if it's missing, you switch back to the default one (French), which makes storing it inside a session variable - useless.
You should either add ?lang=XX in all the links and remove the $_SESSION, or you should make the following changes in order to use the session variable:
}else {
$_SESSION['lang'] = 'fr';
include('french.php');
$langage=$_SESSION['lang'];
}
to:
}else {
if(isset($_SESSION['lang'])){
if($_SESSION['lang'] == 'fr'){
include('french.php');
}else{
include('english.php');
}
}else{
$_SESSION['lang'] = 'fr';
include('french.php');
$langage=$_SESSION['lang'];
}
}
That way, if no language alteration is requested, your script will check if it has a stored language variable, before switching to the default one.
Ideally you should use case instead of IFs if you have more than 2 languages.
}else {
switch($_SESSION['lang']){
case 'en':
include('english.php');
break;
case 'es':
include('spanish.php');
break;
//insert other language cases here
default:
include('french.php');
break;
}
}
My advice is, the third option. Many sites have a separate directories for each of languages and look like this: www.domainname.ext/ for the default language and www.domainname.ext/xx/ for the other languages, where xx is the abbreviation of the language (en for English and etc.)