The last few days I worked on getting translations to work with gettext. Somehow it didn't work the way I wanted it. Big problem there is: You need to restart the server when you update translations. But I kind of liked the gettext style and tools that already exist.

Because of that I wrote my own class in PHP which allows me to get translations done on the future web site for an Android Project.

Here a quick example of code how it works:

require_once "includes/Localization.class.php";
$loc = new Localization;
$loc->setDomain("test");
$loc->setLocale("de_DE");
echo $loc->_("This is a test!");  // translates "This is a test!"

Well. This is the website constructed. But now we need to create the .pot file for this website. Well. No problem. Just run the following command after you set the domain (setDomain). You can as well give an array of files if you have more than one file in the same domain.

$loc->createGettextPotFor(__FILE__);

This will create the locale/test.pot through running a shell command (xgettext needs to be installed). You have to do this for every domain you create through the website. Best is probably to make a .php file which has all the domains with its files. Than you can run this once and get all the files done.

Now you can take that file and copy it to your language folder with the ending .po. For example we place it into "locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/test.po". This is the same way as you would do with gettext. And in this file you can do your translations for German.

Gettext always compiles things. So I thought why should I not do the same? Instead of always read through the entire .po file and filling the array I could just do that once. So I did. When you compile the file will be read, filled into an array and then serialized. The following command will do that for all files in locale:

$loc->compileAll();

Well that's it. And don't forget, that the whole locale folder needs to be writable :).

Here I give you my example files to test it out.

Download Zip

If you have any questions or improvements, let me know in the comments :).