README

Adds support for il8n Detection.

Iteration of a user's language preferences set in the Accept-Language request header, using order of language preference from users web browser; attempts to find a matching locale available in Laravel resources/lang directory.

• Attempts Fallback to a mainland language, honouring the users first preferences.
• Restores saved user preference from an authenticated user User::locale if set.
• Fallback to Laravel configuration app.locale else en (English).

Installation

composer require marcnewton/laravel-alsl

Usage Information

app()->getLocale() will return the value of either the users web browser language preference or authenticated user locale attribute if present, as long as a matching ISO is found in the resources/lang directory else the app.locale config value will be used.

Language Variants

To support variants, create language translation folders in resources/lang.

For example, to support English (United States) and English (United Kingdom); create the following directories: en-US and en-GB in addition to en (English).

How detection works.

Web browsers are natively set to their systems user preferences for languages on installation and then further fallback preferences can be configured in the browser by the user, this information is sent with requests via a header called Accept-Language, it is a widely supported standard often overlooked.

The header is processed and a best match for laravels language directories is detected and set using Laravels built in locale functionality.

Here is an example of some different senarios for an individual whos preference is Mexican Spanish (español mexicano es-MX) and their secondary fallback is United States Spanish (Estados Unidos es-US):

If the user only specified Spanish then this would match es but if the server only has en then it would present en.

However, if the user specified a preference for Spanish first then a Spanish variant, es would match first rather than the latter choices for variants unless the server does not have an es language folder, a variant folder will match else fallback to a configuration default.

Underscores from the Accept-Language header are converted to Hyphens to align with usages in PHP & Javascript localization methods.

Deployments

When adding or removing language support in resources/lang, you should ensure you run php artisan cache:forget resources.languages to clear the cache.