Can t get gettext php on Ubuntu working

Question

The translated string is repeated back when I use Apache and the following example on Mac OS X. However, I receive the original text "Inactive account" on Ubuntu with lighttpd. Without success, I've tried a tonne of different environment variant combinations. I can echo out the contents of the.mo file, so it's also not a problem with file permissions.

<?php

//$locale = 'sv_SE.UTF-8';
$locale = 'sv_SE';

$dir = dirname(__FILE__);

// File permission is apparantly not a problem as this works...
//echo file_get_contents($dir . '/sv_SE/LC_MESSAGES/flattr.mo');

putenv("LANG=$locale");
putenv("LANGUAGE=$locale");
putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
putenv("LC_MESSAGES=$locale");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, $locale);
//setlocale(LANG, $locale);
//setlocale(LANGUAGE, $locale);

bindtextdomain('flattr', $dir);
//bind_textdomain_codeset("flattr", 'UTF-8');
textdomain('flattr');

echo _("Inactive account");

?> 

Can someone help me with this?

Answer 1

I experienced the same issue. I'll outline the steps I took to resolve it on Ubuntu 10.10. 

1) make sure you have 'gettext' installed,

sudo apt-get install gettext

If you can't install "gettext," you can instead install "php-gettext." If you already have "gettext" installed, "php-gettext" is not necessary.

2) After that, create your language's locale. I'll use the term "sv SE" in this example. '/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED' contains a list of the supported locales.

less /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

You'll find multiple lines that start with 'sv_SE',

sv_SE.UTF-8 UTF-8
sv_SE ISO-8859-1
sv_SE.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15

This implies that you have a variety of choices for creating the locale for sv SE. The default character set for that locale is indicated by one of the parameters, sv SE ISO-8859-1, which lacks a period (.). Run the following command to create the locale for the default character set:

sudo locale-gen sv_SE

If you want to generate that locale for the UTF-8 character set, run this command,

sudo locale-gen sv_SE.UTF-8

Restart Apache after generating locales (it won't find the newly generated locales otherwise),

sudo service apache2 restart

3) update your PHP script to match the locale you generated. If you generated the locale for 'sv_SE',

setlocale(LC_ALL, "sv_SE");

But if you generated the UTF-8 equivalent of that locale, use,

setlocale(LC_ALL, "sv_SE.UTF-8");

All should work now.