What are best practices for storing and maintaining language preferences in PHP for a multi-language website?

When building a multi-language website in PHP, it is important to store and maintain language preferences for each user. One common approach is to store the user's language preference in a session variable after they have selected their preferred language. This session variable can then be used throughout the website to display content in the user's chosen language. 

```php
// Start or resume a session
session_start();

// Check if the user has selected a language
if(isset($_GET['lang'])) {
    // Set the language preference in a session variable
    $_SESSION['lang'] = $_GET['lang'];
}

// Default language preference
$defaultLang = 'en';

// Check if a language preference is set in the session, if not, use the default language
$lang = isset($_SESSION['lang']) ? $_SESSION['lang'] : $defaultLang;

// Include language files based on the user's language preference
include 'lang/' . $lang . '.php';
```

In this code snippet, we start or resume a session and check if the user has selected a language preference using a GET parameter. If a language preference is set, we store it in a session variable. We then define a default language and check if a language preference is set in the session. If not, we use the default language. Finally, we include language files based on the user's language preference to display content in the chosen language throughout the website.

Keywords

Localization Internationalization Gettext Language detection Session management

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