PHP Development Guide: Implementing simple multi-language switching function

Introduction:
With the development of the Internet, more and more websites and applications need to support multi-language functions. In web development, implementing multi-language switching function is a very important task. This article will introduce how to use PHP to implement a simple multi-language switching function, and provide code examples for developers to refer to.

1. Preparation work
Before we start to implement the multi-language switching function, we need to do some preparation work. First, we need to determine the supported languages ​​and create the corresponding language files. Generally, the translated text of each language is saved in a separate language file to facilitate maintenance and management.

For example, create a "languages" folder in the project root directory, and create language files in this folder: en.php, zh.php, fr.php, etc. Define an array containing translated text in each language file, for example:

en.php:

return [
    'welcome' => 'Welcome',
    'hello' => 'Hello',
    'goodbye' => 'Goodbye'
];

zh.php:

return [
    'welcome' => '欢迎',
    'hello' => '你好',
    'goodbye' => '再见'
];

fr.php:

return [
    'welcome' => 'Bienvenue',
    'hello' => 'Bonjour',
    'goodbye' => 'Au revoir'
];

2. Implement multi-language switching function

1. Set the default language
   In the PHP code, we can define a global variable to save the currently selected language. For example:

$language = 'en';

By default, we set the language to English.

2. Reading language files
   In order to dynamically switch languages ​​at runtime, we need to write a function to read the corresponding language file. We can create a function getTranslations($lang), where $lang is the language type to be read. In this function we will load the corresponding language file based on the value of $lang and return an array containing the translated text. For example:

function getTranslations($lang) {
    $translations = [];
    $file = __DIR__ . '/languages/' . $lang . '.php';
    if (file_exists($file)) {
        $translations = require_once($file);
    }
    return $translations;
}

3. Implementing the language switching function
   In the HTML page, we can obtain the translated text in the specified language by calling the getTranslations function. And the user-selected language type can be passed using the $_GET parameter or other means. For example:

if (isset($_GET['lang'])) {
    $language = $_GET['lang'];
}
$translations = getTranslations($language);

Use the obtained translated text to replace it in the page. For example:

3. Example Demonstration
The following is a simple example that demonstrates how to implement multi-language switching function in a simple PHP application.

index.php:

    
    



    

    

    


    

        
English
        
中文
        
Français
    

Conclusion:
Through the above code examples, we are familiar with how to use PHP to implement a simple multi-language switching function. Developers can further expand and optimize according to actual needs to achieve more complex functions. I hope this article will help you understand and master multi-language switching.

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