The Internet is used in almost all countries in the world. Despite this development, if we want to use ideographic character sets from a language other than English, it becomes difficult to work our way through the jungle of languages, character sets, fonts, and special libraries to produce software that enables the user to view their language of choice. This is where internationalization comes in.
Here we will take an exploratory dive into doing it by hand in PHP, as PHP is a great language for developing dynamic web sites. Through the course of this chapter we will look at:
The jargon associated with the subject
Reasons for internationalization
The Gettext library
Extensions to the system using objects
A case study that takes us through the process of internationalizing a script