Internationalisation with PHP and the Intl extension. Featuring source code and three real world case studies.

1. Internationalisation with PHP This presentation is about the “Intl” extension for PHP. By Daniel Rhodes of Warp Asylum http://www.warpasylum.co.uk

4. Format numbers, times and dates

6. See PHP docs at http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.intl.php

8. Korean language system of counting in tens of thousands. 10,000 is “one man” for example.

9. German alphabet with its umlauted vowels (ä, ö and ü) and eszett (ß)

11. Bundled extension as of PHP 5.3.0 (compile freaks will want --enable-intl)

12. PHP 5.2.0 onwards can get the extension from PECL

13. ( http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.pecl.php )

15. First play and test

17. Format currency amounts and other numbers (NumberFormatter class)

18. Locale getting, setting and information (Locale class)

19. Format natural language sentences (MessageFormatter class)

20. Format dates (IntlDateFormatter class)

21. And much more! (Transliterator class not yet implemented)

23. Dictionary , phonebook and Austrian sort orders

24. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetische_Sortierung

29. What about the other two sort orders?

30. Well, sort() supports system locales...

31. ...so let's try that!

32. Case study – sorting German

34. Setlocale() [and fgetcsv(), nl_langinfo(), localeconv() etc] needs system locale installed on OS

35. But system locale can be spelled differently, or be absent! , on different OS

36. And we still haven't got phonebook sort order!

37. A job for Intl...

38. Case study – sorting German

40. ICU locales do not specify encoding (as ICU is for Unicode)

41. ICU locales specify variant locales differently

42. ICU locales support UCA keywords (eg. numbers=roman)

44. Collator::setAttribute()

46. Basically the current emperor's reign is named “Heisei” and 2011 is Heisei 23 as it's the 23 rd year of the current emperor's reign

47. Month and day same as Gregorian

48. Used for more official paperwork and formal situations (Gregorian year used day-to-day)

49. Let's see how Intl can present this format for a Japanese locale...

50. Case study – Japanese era

52. Because calendar=japanese supported by UCA

53. Give IntlDateFormatter::__construct() [email_address] =uca_calendar_type and IntlDateFormatter::TRADITIONAL to get non-Gregorian calendars

55. IntlDateFormatter::setPattern()

57. Korean equivalent of the newspaper style “four million, two hundred thousand and forty-seven”

58. So need Korean words / characters for numbers

59. BUT Korean counts in ten thousands

60. One, ten, hundred, thousand, man (ten thousand), eok (100 million ie. Ten thousand man), jo (one trillion ie. Ten thousand eok)

61. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_numerals

62. Case study – Korean numbers

64. We have to create, and then set, our own spellout rules

65. Luckily we can base our rules on the already present Japanese spellout rules!

66. Japanese also counts in ten thousands and uses non-Arabic numerals

68. Case study – Korean numbers

70. Hanja

71. Financial / anti-forgery Hanja

72. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_numerals)

74. But we can usually set our own rules

75. Don't need to install locales on our OS

76. More flexible and fine-grained than system locales (ie. setlocale() and money_format() etc)

77. NumberFormatter class also supports durations

78. Resource bundles for locale-specific messages, patterns etc supported with ResourceBundle class

80. http://site.icu-project.org

81. http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.intl.php

82. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetische_Sortierung

83. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_era

84. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_numerals