How Can PHP Detect the Language of a UTF-8 String?

PHP Language Detection for UTF-8 Strings

In PHP, detecting the language of a UTF-8 string is a common task. One versatile solution is the Text_LanguageDetect PEAR package.

This package offers simplicity in use, with a database of 52 languages. However, Eastern Asian language detection is not supported.

Usage

To use the Text_LanguageDetect package, follow these steps:

1. Include the package using require_once 'Text/LanguageDetect.php';
2. Initialize the language detector object: $l = new Text_LanguageDetect();
3. Detect the language and specify the number of top results to return: $result = $l->detect($text, 4);

If the detection is successful, you will receive an array with detected languages and their confidence scores. Otherwise, an error message will be displayed.

Example

Consider the following example:

require_once 'Text/LanguageDetect.php';
$l = new Text_LanguageDetect();
$result = $l->detect("Hallo Welt", 4);

if (PEAR::isError($result)) {
    echo $result->getMessage();
} else {
    print_r($result);
}

This code will detect the language of the string "Hallo Welt" and return an array of detected languages and their confidence scores. The array may look like this:

Array
(
    [german] => 0.407037037037
    [dutch] => 0.288065843621
    [english] => 0.283333333333
    [danish] => 0.234526748971
)

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