2006-07-31
i18n tip for django
"Django's":http://www.djangoproject.com "Internationalization":http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/i18n/ support is freaking awesome.
and it is so easy to use it isn't funny.
Django's i18n support is based on the brower sending a accept-language, or having the server set a cookie to handle the user preference.
I was in the middle of porting a legacy app for a client which didn't work the way the designers of i18n had thought of.. they set the language in the URL itself for the request. (ie /challenge/spanish/signup.html was the spanish version of the page and /challenge/english/signup.html was the english version) .
now..this presented 2 problems.
first 'english/spanish' are not language codes, and more importantly I wanted the server to render the page it was asked for in the language specified.. (it couldn't trust the cookie in this instance).
so.. an easy solution
at the top of each view I added a call to 'setlang'
def setlang(request, language ):
if language == 'english':
translation.activate('en')
request.LANGUAGE_CODE = translation.get_language()
request.session['django_language'] = 'en'
elif language == 'spanish':
translation.activate('es')
request.LANGUAGE_CODE = translation.get_language()
request.session['django_language'] = 'es'
{% blocktrans %}welcometext{% endblocktrans %}
{% blocktrans %}Welcome to the new and improved version of FOO BAR.... {% endblocktrans %}