URL Beautification using .htaccess or php? - php

Question

In search of a more userfriendly & search engine friendly urls, i want have beautied my urls:
The htacces apache rule that achieves this (Thanks to Laurence Gonsalves)
RewriteRule ^([a-z][a-z])/(.*) /$2?ln=$1 [L]
which makes this possible:
/uk/somepage instead of /somepage?ln=uk
/de/somepage instead of /somepage?ln=de
/ja/somepage instead of /somepage?ln=ja
Now the difficult part: previously, the url was replaced with a normal link like href="?ln=de" or href="?ln=it" for changing language of the current page. But now how can i achieve that? Sothat the current page stays the same, but only the preceding two lowercase letters that say to the browser what language it is in change?
So how to tell the link to only change the /uk/contact to /de/contact once the german (de) language flag is clicked? php solution to rewrite the url or htaccess solutions are accepted.
I found out that $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] will output /uk/somepage but i cant write the php code that can split up the components, add a new language code like "de" into it, which i can put manually into a normal href that goes on a German flag. etc. Thanks for any and all clues/answers!

Answer 1

You'd probably want to look at something like explode or regular expressions to strip out the non-language part of the URL (e.g., /contact) and just add it again to a new string containing the language identifier.
Maybe this could get you started:
<?php
function changeLanguageLink($language_id)
{
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$link = preg_replace('/\/?(uk|de)\/(.*)/', "/$2", $uri);
$link = $language_id . $link;
return $link;
}
?>
Change language to UK

Answer 2

Well, you can split the request_uri using, well, split() or explode().
$uri_bits=explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
In theory the language identifier will be in $uri_bits[ 1] (as [0] would contain a zero length string, but you should test it by print_r()-ing the array). Of course, you should test if the $uri_bits[ 1] exists, and it's the language identifier, the simplest way to do it would be:
if($uri_bits[1]==$_GET['lang'])
Then you can change that and concatenate the bits again using implode()
$uri_bits[1]="it";
$url_german=implode('/', $uri_bits);
At least that's how I'd do it.