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Internationalization

Phalcon is written in C as an extension for PHP. There is a PECL extension that offers internationalization functions to PHP applications called intl. Starting from PHP 5.4/5.5 this extension is bundled with PHP. Its documentation can be found in the pages of the official PHP manual.

Phalcon does not offer this functionality, since creating such a component would be replicating existing code.

In the examples below, we will show you how to implement the intl extension’s functionality into Phalcon powered applications.

This guide is not intended to be a complete documentation of the intl extension. Please visit its the documentation of the extension for a reference.

Find out best available Locale

There are several ways to find out the best available locale using intl. One of them is to check the HTTP “Accept-Language” header:

<?php

$locale = Locale::acceptFromHttp($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]);

// Locale could be something like "en_GB" or "en"
echo $locale;

Below method returns a locale identified. It is used to get language, culture, or regionally-specific behavior from the Locale API. Examples of identifiers include:

  • en-US (English, United States)
  • zh-Hant-TW (Chinese, Traditional Script, Taiwan)
  • fr-CA, fr-FR (French for Canada and France respectively)

Formatting messages based on Locale

Part of creating a localized application is to produce concatenated, language-neutral messages. The MessageFormatter allows for the production of those messages.

Printing numbers formatted based on some locale:

<?php

// Prints € 4 560
$formatter = new MessageFormatter("fr_FR", "€ {0, number, integer}");
echo $formatter->format(array(4560));

// Prints USD$ 4,560.5
$formatter = new MessageFormatter("en_US", "USD$ {0, number}");
echo $formatter->format(array(4560.50));

// Prints ARS$ 1.250,25
$formatter = new MessageFormatter("es_AR", "ARS$ {0, number}");
echo $formatter->format(array(1250.25));

Message formatting using time and date patterns:

<?php

//Setting parameters
$time   = time();
$values = array(7, $time, $time);

// Prints "At 3:50:31 PM on Apr 19, 2012, there was a disturbance on planet 7."
$pattern   = "At {1, time} on {1, date}, there was a disturbance on planet {0, number}.";
$formatter = new MessageFormatter("en_US", $pattern);
echo $formatter->format($values);

// Prints "À 15:53:01 le 19 avr. 2012, il y avait une perturbation sur la planète 7."
$pattern   = "À {1, time} le {1, date}, il y avait une perturbation sur la planète {0, number}.";
$formatter = new MessageFormatter("fr_FR", $pattern);
echo $formatter->format($values);

Locale-Sensitive comparison

The Collator class provides string comparison capability with support for appropriate locale-sensitive sort orderings. Check the examples below on the usage of this class:

<?php

// Create a collator using Spanish locale
$collator = new Collator("es");

// Returns that the strings are equal, in spite of the emphasis on the "o"
$collator->setStrength(Collator::PRIMARY);
var_dump($collator->compare("una canción", "una cancion"));

// Returns that the strings are not equal
$collator->setStrength(Collator::DEFAULT_VALUE);
var_dump($collator->compare("una canción", "una cancion"));

Transliteration

Transliterator provides transliteration of strings:

<?php

$id = "Any-Latin; NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC; [:Punctuation:] Remove; Lower();";
$transliterator = Transliterator::create($id);

$string = "garçon-étudiant-où-L'école";
echo $transliterator->transliterate($string); // garconetudiantoulecole