How does the choice of using gettext in PHP for language translations affect the scalability and performance of websites with multiple languages?
Using gettext in PHP for language translations can improve scalability and performance of websites with multiple languages by offloading the translation process to a system-level library, which is more efficient than handling translations within the PHP code itself. This allows for better caching of translated strings and reduces the overhead on the PHP interpreter, resulting in faster page load times for multilingual websites.
// Set the locale for gettext
$locale = 'fr_FR'; // French locale
putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
// Specify the location of the translation files
bindtextdomain('messages', 'path/to/translations');
bind_textdomain_codeset('messages', 'UTF-8');
// Choose domain
textdomain('messages');
// Translate a string
echo _('Hello, World!');