Switching languages on a website with PHP
- by jnkrois
Hello everybody,
I'm just looking for some advice. I'm creating a website that offers (at least) 2 languages.
The way I'm setting it up is by using XML files for the language, PHP to retrieve the values in the XML nodes.
Say you have any XML file, being loaded as follows:
<?php
$lang = "en";
$xmlFile = simplexml_load_file("$lang/main.xml");
?>
Once the file contents are available, I just output each node into an HTML tag like so:
<li><?php echo $xmlFile->navigation->home; ?></li>
which in turn is equal to : <li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
as a nav bar link.
Now, the way in which I'm switching languages is by changing the value of the "$lang" variable, through a "$_POST", like so:
if(isset($_POST['es'])){
$lang = "es";
}elseif(isset($_POST['en'])){
$lang = "en";
}
The value of the "$lang" variable is reset and the new file is loaded, loading as well all the new nodes from the new XML file, hence changing the language.
I'm just wondering if there is another way to reset the "$lang" variable using something else, other than "$_POST" or "$_GET". I don't want to use query string either.
I know I could use JavaScript or jQuery to achieve this, but I'd like to make the site not too dependable on JavaScript.
I'd appreciate any ideas or advice.
Thanks
