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i18n and UTF-8: Ready for Multilingual Applications The Freeform framework is the only PHP5 framework that is UTF-8-enabled to ease the creation of multilingual and localized web applications. From now, you do not have to worry about the encoding conversion - everything is done in UTF-8. It means that all documents that are produced by application and all data that is passed back from the remote client is in UTF-8. The framework enforces the UTF-8 to be the internal encoding of PHP. This ensures that all your applications can be developed with internationalization that requires no effort. The simple but powerful i18n package available as a core package starting from version 1.2.0 allows you to format numbers, strings, dates and prices as well as to to retrieve localized messages for a given locale. This package eliminates all the weaknesses of the set_locale() PHP function that is not really cross-platform. With i18n, you just specify the locale name only, and you can easily create your own locales. Starting with the same 1.2.0 branch the html package supports internationalization. From now on, you can easily develop localized templates - that will automatically translate messages into the language of the current locale. Note Such extended functionality relies on the mbstring extension of the PHP, so that you will have to enable it if you want to use Freeform 1.2.x. Please also note that you will either have to enable the mbstring.func_overload in the php.ini or use the mb_* functions to handle strings. Freeform presets the mb_regex_encoding to UTF-8 so that you can safely use mb_ereg and friends. If you use preg_* functions, then you should use the u pattern modifier to correctly match UTF-8 strings. Also note that you do not have to change anything if you want to develop English-only applications. It also must be underlined that you will have to use UTF-8-capable editor to develop localized templates and actions. Zend Studio has such editor, you can set the encoding of the saved files to UTF-8. If you do not have such editor, you will have to convert your sources to UTF-8 (this again does not apply for the English-only applications). |
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