Let's say I want to display the following text to the user:
"John's car"
I'm using gettext to output it:
sprintf(_("%s's car"), $firstName)
The obvious problem is that, if the first name of the user ends in an S, we'll get something like this:
"James's car" (should be "James' car")
How do I solve that problem, especially considering that other languages might pose a similar challenge (different genitives depending on word ending or similar)?
Simply put: write a function with an explicit if to get the genitive form for a name, and print that instead. I'd provide an example but you haven't indicated what language we're talking about!
Related
This problem might not occure in English, but does really hurt in Polish language. I guess that my question is mostly for Polish users since they might already have a decent solution.
What I mean, is that the verbs in Polish language, are different for male and female in past time. And there are dozens of different options. If my script need to display lots and lots of text - it really becomes a painful problem to deal with. Short example (not very elegant use of language, but for demonstration purpose):
Male: On poszedł i nie znalazł, więc klasnął w dłonie i nagle go coś pożarło.
Female: Ona poszła i nie znalazła, więc klasnęła w dłonie i nagle ją coś pożarło.
I managed to find such an solution: each time at the beginning of script, I prepare variable that looks like that:
$verb[$ending][$sex] = 'something';
//$ending does contain - for my convenience - letters that says what kind of eding am I changing, instead of numeric options
//Examples:
$verb['-a']['male'] = '';
$verb['-a']['female'] = 'a';
//works for On=>Ona, znalazł=>znalazła
$verb['al-ela']['male'] = 'ął';
$verb['al-ela']['female'] = 'ęła';
//works for klasnął=>klasnęła
Now if I add fact, that 99% of time I don't know from the beginning what kind of sex am I dealing with, my variable start look kinda scary: $verb['al-ela'][$_SESSION['user'.$id]['sex']]. So my end text does look like that:
O'.$verb['-a'][$_SESSION['user'.$id]['sex']].' posz'.$verb['edl-la'][$_SESSION['user'.$id]['sex']].' i nie znalazł'.$verb['-a'][$_SESSION['user'.$id]['sex']].', więc klasn'.$verb['al-ela'][$_SESSION['user'.$id]['sex']].' w dłonie i nagle '.$verb['go-ja'][$_SESSION['user'.$id]['sex']].' coś pożarło.
Yes, sure - this is rather extreme example, but sometimes text really does look like that and it is unavoidable.
To make long story short, here are my questions:
Am I doing it wrong? Is there a better/faster/more handy solution for such type of problems?
Is there a script that might detect/change endings for me without ruining rest of the text?
I struggled to find full list of possible ending variations in Polish (for both singular, and plural), so I'm creating my own list as I'm finding new options. Perhaps someone does have a list like that => it might help me to create script from my 2nd question.
Thanks a lot in advance, best regards!
Unfortunately, in my current workplace, I have to use Smarty on a project they had before i was employed.
Anyway, I am trying to call in a Dynamic html title for each category in the app.
So for example, the title used to be pageTitle="{$category} in {$areaname}".
However I now want it to be: pageTitle="{html_title}". Within html_title (from db), is a string, for example: "Monkeys in the {areaname}" Where {areaname} could be "jungle".
When I output the result, I get:
"Monkeys in {areaname}".
So to cut a long story short, its not recognizing the variable. It is treating it as a string. I have googled my head off and can't find an answer. I hate smarty!
Please help!
Couldn't you just do something like
$html_title = preg_replace("/{areaname}/", "jungle", $html_title);
after fetching the title from the database?
I am working on a project and there are going to be 3 different languages: English, French and Spanish. This will be defined when the user signs up.
Now in my config file I have the following:
define("DEFAULT_SLOGAN", "The default slogan will go here.");
Until I started realizing that I needed to accept different languages.
The user has an assigned language code (EN, FR, SP). How would I go about having different language strings for each page? Would I need to have something like this:
define("DEFAULT_SLOGAN_EN", "Slogan in english");
define("DEFAULT_SLOGAN_FR", "Slogan in french");
define("DEFAULT_SLOGAN_SP", "Slogan in spanish");
And for each string just have 3 different versions of it? Not too sure the best way to approach this.
Thanks!
A simple strategy that is often used are arrays:
$lang['en'] = array(
'DEFAULT_SLOGAN' => 'The default slogan will go here.',
);
// Same for other languages
Then, in your actual code, make sure that $lang is available (you can use the global keyword for this) and use these arrays.
A better approach would be to create
locale_definitions_EN.php containing
define("DEFAULT_SLOGAN", "The english default slogan will go here.");
local_definitions_FR.php containing
define("DEFAULT_SLOGAN", "The french default slogan will go here.");
etc. and then do something like
include "locale_definitions_$userLocale.php";
This has the advantage, that you don't need the memory to hold the unused other language constants.
I would like my php website to be able to be multilinguistic. I thought of using:
echo $lang[$_SESSION['lang']]['WellcomeMessage'];
but I found that I will be needing to format the text, say for example male/female or putting some values from the DB. So I thought that simple strings might not do the trick for formatting?
I know #define might have worked in C as the string translates to code, but I don't know how php does that. For example:
define ($lang['en']['credit_left'],'you have $credits_left');
define ($lang['sp']['credit_left'],'tienes $credits_left creditos mas');
Any suggestions?
In php (or maybe gettext in general), what does gettext do when it sees a variable to dynamic content?
I have 2 cases in mind.
1) Let's say I have <?=$user1?> poked John <?=$user2?>. Maybe in some language the order of the words is different. How does gettext handle that? (no, I'm not building facebook, that was just an example)
2) Let's say I store some categories in a database. They rarely, but they are store in a database. What would happen if I do <?php echo gettext($data['name']); ?> ? I would like the translators to translate those category names too, but does it have to be done in the database itself?
Thanks
Your best option is to use sprintf() function. Then you would use printf notation to handle dynamic content in your strings. Here is a function I found on here a while ago to handle this easily for you:
function translate()
{
$args = func_get_args();
$num = func_num_args();
$args[0] = gettext($args[0]);
if($num <= 1)
return $args[0];
return call_user_func_array('sprintf', $args);
}
Now for example 1, you would want to change the string to:
%s poked %s
Which you would input into the translate() function like this:
<?php echo translate('%s poked %s', $user1, $user2); ?>
You would parse out all translate() functions with poEdit. and then translate the string "%s poked %s" into whatever language you wanted, without modifying the %s string placeholders. Those would get replace upon output by the translate() function with user1 and user2 respectively. You can read more on sprintf() in the PHP Manual for more advanced usages.
For issue #2. You would need to create a static file which poEdit could parse containing the category names. For example misctranslations.php:
<?php
_('Cars');
_('Trains');
_('Airplanes');
Then have poEdit parse misctranslations.php. You would then be able to output the category name translation using <?php echo gettext($data['name']); ?>
To build a little on what Mark said... the only problem with the above solution is that the static list must be always maintained by hand and if you add a new string before all the others or you completely change an existing one, the soft you use for translating might confuse the new strings and you could lose some translations.
I'm actually writing an article about this (too little time to finish it anytime soon!) but my proposed answer goes something like this:
Gettext allows you to store the line number that the string appears in the code inside the .po file. If you change the string entirely, the .po editor will know that the string is not new but it is an old one (thanks to the line number).
My solution to this is to write a script that reads the database and creates a static file with all the gettext strings. The big difference to Mark's solution is to have the primary key (let's call it ID) on the database match the line number in the new file. In that case, if you completely change one original translation, the lines are still the same and your translator soft will recognize the strings.
Of course there might be newer and more intelligent .po editors out there but at least if yours is giving you trouble with newer strings then this will solve them.
My 2 cents.
If you have somewhere in your code:
<?=sprintf(_('%s poked %s'), $user1, $user2)?>
and one of your languages needs to swap the arguments it is very simple. Simply translate your code like this:
msgid "%s poked %s"
msgstr "%2$s translation_of_poked %1$s"