[harlock]

I'm writing a web application from the ground up which needs to support multiple world languages.

My first instinct was to create a language file for each language, which contains all the textual output of the software in each language, defined as constants or variables.

but then I ran into a problem of how do I load it in without massive waste of resources?

If I load it in as a mass of session variables at user login, then there's a copy in RAM for each session. If I load it in as a bunch of regular variables or constants every time a user requests a new page, well, there's a ton of RAM and redundant loading too! Even worse!

Is there some place I can define the language strings as superglobal variables that are loaded into one place in RAM on system boot / PHP startup? Or is there an even better way? I was looking at the superglobal types, and I'm not sure any of them were really built for that purpose.

Thanks,

--Harlock

[dennispopel]

Hello,

Looks like your site will have million pages Don't worry, just store messages in one include file like

<?
$m = array(
'en' => array('welcome'=>'Welcome!'),
'es' => array('welcome'=>'Hola!'));
...
?>

and require it on every request, then just use <?=$m[$_SESSION['lang']]['welcome']?> in the pages to display localized messages.

You could also make multiple message files like en.msg or es.msg and require them based on the value of the sesison variable.

You easily cannot preload messages on the PHP startup so they stay in memory and are available for subsequent requests.

[harlock]

You easily cannot preload messages on the PHP startup so they stay in memory and are available for subsequent requests.

No wonder why all those CMS systems are so slow...all that redundant loading... (and massive feature creep...which is what got me writing my own stuff in the first place...)