How to translate a page in PHP?

Question

PHP

I have a business card site. The client wanted to add two more languages ​​for it. I don't want to make a separate folder and duplicate the code.
Some data needs to be mapped from the DB.
Plus, you may have to add new languages ​​in the future, so it's important to think about that as well.

What is the best and fastest way to implement this?

Answer 1

Добавляешь в таблицы поля, что-то типа 
было text
стало text, text_en, text_sp, text_pl  и т.д.
$lang = $_GET['lang']; // Допустим lang хранится в гет параметре (можно и в куки хранить выбранный язык)
$lang = in_array( $lang, [ 'ru', 'en', 'sp', 'pl' ] ) ? "_$lang" : ''; // Получается так "_ru" (вместо ru язык выбранный) или пустая строка.
При генерации страницы где выводишь $row['text'] заменяешь на $row["text$lang"].
Что касается статичных данных, то проще хранить шаблоны для каждого языка и подключать при генерации страницы.

Answer 2

What you are looking for is called i18n (short for internationalization). There are many ways to implement. If you use a framework, then this mechanism is most likely already there (google for *framework name* i18n). If samopis, then here is a simple example.
All static text from the code can be put into a separate json file (or just a php file that returns an array, and include it).
The file must contain a multidimensional array of the form

return [
            'ru' => [
                'text1' => 'текст 1',
                'text2' => 'текст 2'
            ],
            'en' => [
                'text1' => 'text 1',
                'text2' => 'text 2'
            ],
            'es' => [
                'text1' => 'texto 1',
                'text2' => 'texto 2'
            ]
        ];

If different languages ​​are also in the database, then you need to either duplicate the tables, or create additional fields with language prefixes. It already depends on the structure of the database