Gettext

User Contributed Notes

afrimuchkov at yandex dot ru 29-Oct-2017 07:35
Soo.... It was pretty hard)
Finaly:
1)Working if dir is "en", not "en_GB" or "en_GB.utf8". Only "en".
2)But use setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, "en_GB.utf8");
Anonymous 16-Dec-2014 09:00
for all they try to use a non-alpha-char in a domain name: DONT TRY THIS !!! we have search some hours to realized that "foo-bar" is not a good idea for a domain name. sometimes we got a correct translation, and sometimes not. so just use only the characters A-Z for a domain name!
Johnny 14-Jul-2014 06:31
Please also be noticed that the server will cache the .mo file on first loading and then "seldom" reload it, so your update to .mo file will not be revealed.  Some solution to clear the cache from web is to restart the apache server, or to use another name for the textdomain everytime.  These are tedious.  I cannot find better solution yet.
yuricardenas at gmail dot com 21-Jun-2009 08:30
*An important thing to keep in mind*:
Do not forget to set the charset in .po file!
For example:

"Content-Type: text/plain; CHARSET=gb2312\n"

Then PHP will be able to find the .mo file you generated, using msgfmt, from the .po file WITH CHARSET SET.

Because of this I've wasted a lot of time debugging my code, testing every single little changes people suggested over this manual and Internet:

<?php

//this:
setlocale( LC_MESSAGES, 'pt_BR')
//or this:
setlocale( LC_MESSAGES, 'pt_BR.utf8')
//or this:
setlocale( LC_MESSAGES, '')

//this:
putenv("LANG=pt_BR.utf8");
//or this:
putenv("LANGUAGE=pt_BR.utf8");

//this:
bindtextdomain('mydomain', dirname(__FILE__).'/locale');
//or this:
bindtextdomain("*", dirname(__FILE__).'/locale');
//or this:
bindtextdomain('*', dirname(__FILE__).'/locale');

//setting or not "bind_textdomain_codeset()":
bind_textdomain_codeset("mydomain", 'UTF-8');
?>

As well as what locale directory name to set:
./locale/pt_BR.UTF8/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.mo
or
./locale/pt_BR/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.mo
or
./locale/pt/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.mo

Finally, the code which brought the right translated strings (also with the correct charset) was:

<?php

$directory
= dirname(__FILE__).'/locale';
$domain = 'mydomain';
$locale ="pt_BR.utf8";

//putenv("LANG=".$locale); //not needed for my tests, but people say it's useful for windows

setlocale( LC_MESSAGES, $locale);
bindtextdomain($domain, $directory);
textdomain($domain);
bind_textdomain_codeset($domain, 'UTF-8');
?>

And the three directory's names worked out, using the pt_BR.utf8 locale. (My tests were made restarting Apache then trying each directory).

I hope to help someone else not to waste as much time as I've wasted... =P

Using:
Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy)
Apache 2.2.8
PHP 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.6
jpatokal at iki dot fi 29-May-2009 09:05
Warning for Linux (Ubuntu) users!  Your system will *only* support the locales installed on your OS, in the *exact* format given by your OS.  (See also the PHP setlocale man page.)  To get a list of them, enter locale -a, which will give you something like this:

C
en_US.utf8
ja_JP.utf8
POSIX

So this machine only has English and Japanese!  To add eg. Finnish, install the package:

sudo apt-get install language-pack-fi-base

Rerun locale -a, and "fi_FI.utf8" should appear.  Make sure you're using the same name in your PHP code:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "fi_FI.utf8");

Adjust your po paths so that they match, e.g. "./locale/fi_FI.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po".

Now restart Apache, and it should finally work.  Figuring this out took quite a while...
sasq1 at go2 dot pl 31-Mar-2009 07:18
And what about pgettext and npgettext? They are there in the gettext documentation, but there aren't in PHP. They're very useful if you have the same messages for translation, but in different contexts, so they should be translated separately and probably differently.

Fortunately, there is a simple work-around, which may help:
From the gettext.h header one can find out that pgettext() is only a macro calling dcgettext() internally with properly mangled parameters - msgctxt and msgid are glued together with use of ASCII char 4 [EOT, End Of Text]. The same way they're written in .mo files, so it's possible to refer them this way.

Here's my "emulated" pgettext() function:

<?php
  
if (!function_exists('pgettext')) {
     
      function
pgettext($context, $msgid)
      {
        
$contextString = "{$context}\004{$msgid}";
        
$translation = dcgettext('messages', contextString,LC_MESSAGES);
         if (
$translation == $contextString)  return $msgid;
         else  return
$translation;
      }
     
   }
?>

By default, xgettext doesn't support pgettext function for PHP source files. But there is a parameter which can work-around it. Here's how I call xgettext:

   xgettext --force-po --keyword="pgettext:1c,2" -c -o messages.po sourceFile.php

In sourceFile.php I use the following test code:

   pgettext('menu', 'Open');  //Substitute "Otwórz"
   pgettext('forum', 'Open');  //Substitute "Otwarty", different context

Generated .po file fragment:

   msgctxt "menu"
   msgid "Open"
   msgstr "Otwórz"
  
   msgctxt "forum"
   msgctxt "Open"
   msgstr "Otwarty"

I've tested it out and everything works fine :-) If anyone have some further suggestions or fixes, please write ;-)
rainwalker at seznam dot cz 19-Mar-2009 06:16
My PHP app was made for UTF-8 but i had a problem that gettext always returned all texts in ISO-8859-2 instead of UTF-8.

Then i found out that you have to set locale in PHP exactly to encoding you request. So when i wanted czech UTF-8 i used:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "cs_CZ.UTF-8");

Now it works...
djogopatrao at gmail dot com 10-Dec-2008 07:49
It is noteworthy that, according to the GNU gettext FAQ[1], * source code must be ASCII *. That means that you can't write code like

<?= _("áááààà??")?>

in UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 or whatever, and hope that that will work. It won't.

[1]http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/FAQ.html#nonascii_strings
php at devicenull dot org 21-Aug-2008 04:58
To get this working properly on debian, install the locales-all package.  I just spent a few hours finding a bug where it wouldn't work because that package is missing