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Internationalizing Applications in PHP

Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 6:53 pm
by alex.barylski
Recently I have taken great interest in making my application as "internationally aware" as possible.

I have googled a bit and read about a dozen articles. The following are a list of resources I found extremely helpful in assisting me in understanding what is required in Internationalizing an application:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/libra ... index.html
http://www.shawnolson.net/a/946/unicode ... ql-41.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
http://acko.net/blog/unicode-in-php

My hope is to build a solid list of quality articles and tutorials on the subject - despite PHP6 with it's Unicode support (it's a long way from being in common use). Please add to this list as I look forward to reading other articles on the subject. Personally i'd like to see this topic made sticky. :D

Cheers :)

Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 10:28 pm
by Ambush Commander
Be careful: Unicode and internationalization, while related, are not one and the same. I've found Wikipedia's article to offer a concise summary of what internationalization entails.

Given the vast cultural/language differences in our world, an international application cannot be designed from scratch: a good i18n design will be harvested. I strongly recommend reading the code of internationally used software applications to see how they've evolved to handle the task.

See also ICU.