Why do witches burn?

This is a short, non-interesting article about a translation system. Nothing new or original here.
I put here because my next article will use it and it’ll be a very long one.

I a few month, I’m gonna talk a lot about translation. I’ve made many things about it, especially for automatic translations.
Here, it’s about having a website in several languages. Nothing difficult.

Most people use the getext functions. There are translation files, binary processed, with cache. A very efficient and quite simple system to have translations. People who use that are from the past.
Now, we use a simple SQL table, with a field per language. It’s slower, takes more resources, like, hu, a hundred times more ? But it’s soooooo much simpler that we prefer that.

The translation interface is so uninteresting I won’t put it here. I’ll just show you my table, as it will be used in next articles, just like my sqlQueries class.
I use it on all my websites (mostly Supafan and DB Multiverse)

CREATE TABLE `get_textes` (
  `id` int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `section` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
  `txt_en` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_fr` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_it` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_es` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_jp` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_ar` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_nl` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_pl` text NOT NULL,
  `txt_pt` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  KEY `section` (`section`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

You can give the name you want to the table, as if I cared…
The “section” field will be used to group some sentences together. It’s easier when I want to give to someone only the translations for the times functions, or the comment system, or the translations of the text of DBM’s pages…
The “txt_en” field is required, because it’s the language to use, when the translation is missing.
The engine is MyISAM because it’s mostly a table you read and not one you edit (yes yes I actually thought about that).
So yes, there us a field per language. It’s the simplest by far. Donc forget utf8, it’s your best friends when you add “weird” languages like Asians and Arabic.

Also, in you PHP scripts, always do this query, just after the database connection :

SET NAMES 'utf8'

Otherwise, you may have weird results.

The translation function :

function __($id) {
    global $lang;
    static $tablename = 'get_textes';
    $id = (int) $id;
    $R = mysql_query("SELECT `txt_$lang`, txt_en FROM $tablename WHERE id=$id LIMIT 1");
    $txt = mysql_result($R, 0, 0);
    if (!$txt) return mysql_result($R, 0, 1);
    return $txt;
}

You do the work you must do so the global variable $lang (or $GLOBALS['lang'] if you want to use that instead) can only have a value that’s a database field.

So no, there is no cache on anything like this. I didn’t want and didn’t have time to think about this kind of things.
After all, a database is made to be accessed. There is an index.

That’s all folks!