What are some best practices for handling multilingual content in PHP applications, especially when it comes to translations?

When handling multilingual content in PHP applications, it's important to use language files for translations to make it easier to manage and update content in multiple languages. One common approach is to store translations in separate files for each language, and then load the appropriate language file based on the user's language preference. 

// Example of loading language files based on user's language preference

// Determine user's language preference (can be based on user settings, browser settings, etc.)
$user_language = 'en'; // Example: English

// Load language file based on user's language preference
if(file_exists('lang/' . $user_language . '.php')) {
    require_once 'lang/' . $user_language . '.php';
} else {
    // Fallback to default language (e.g. English)
    require_once 'lang/en.php';
}

// Usage example:
echo $lang['welcome_message']; // Output: Hello, welcome to our website!

Keywords

Localization gettext multibyte ICU translation cache

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