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Thu, 23 Oct 2003

Did you ever have problems with the lack of gettext support on your hosting provider? I surely did.

Did you ever have problems with using system-set locales on your hosting provider (eg. imagine using a "sr@Latn" locale on a system which doesn't even have sane "sr" locales)? I surely did.

So, what's the solution? You either don't have the root access to the system, or you don't want to bother installing all the software and locales just to make translations happen.

Well, there was a "fallback" library for reading MO files (products of GNU gettext msgfmt tool) for a long time in standard Python distribution, but there was none for PHP (at least I couldn't find it).

There WAS none, but there is one NOW! It's called PHP-gettext (am I not inventive?), and you can grab PHP-gettext 1.0.1 [1] from my hacks collection. It's published under GPL, so it's free software. It also means that there's no warranty, and that it at least

Works For Me!

It's based on the description of MO file format in gettext info documentation. Doesn't provide all the background architecture of gettext proper, but it provides what you need most: using gettext() or _() calls, and using ngettext() calls. Oh yeah, it might be real slow for you — I didn't use it with project larger than 100 strings so far.

Some may consider it a feature, others may consider it a bug, but you can set the full path to the MO file that you want to read. This means that you have to take care of the administrativia of "gettext domains", "locales", etc. but in a sense where PHP is used, I consider it only a plus.

Anyway, check the lengthy README file (included) for all the details.

[1] There was a short-lived 1.0.0 version which is almost the same

[02:40] | [] | # | G | | TB

Very well. I used gettext few times from PHP and I think that gettext is the most powerfull i18n library.

I didn't tested your code yet, so I cannot say anything for speed of this-like implemented gettext support, but I am sure that this is good for small sized projects.

It is better than stupid usage of so called "lang files". It is more powerfull, in any way.
— Posted by Goran Rakić at Thu Oct 23 13:09:57 2003

Actually, the only bottleneck in speed so far is file reading speed. I need a readint32() function, but it seems PHP doesn't provide reading four bytes of file like an int, and choosing the byteorder you like. Because of this, I read byte-by-byte, and assemble an int myself. I tried playing with casting four-byte string to int, but that didn't work. Got any clue on how to speed it up?

Still, because of the nature of the MO file design, there's not much you can do to improve it, and I don't think it's too much slower than the standard library (apart from a one caching TODO).

If you care about the speed, there's a bunch of caching mechanism in my code, and I'm planning on adding some more. There are comments in the code that mention where should it be done, so you might try it yourself (in translate(), just add a check if some array [which you'll add to if there isn't] contains the translation for wanted string, and the same for ngettext()).
— Posted by Danilo Segan at Thu Oct 23 19:27:37 2003

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Thu, 23 Oct 2003