Learning Is Fun

Hello Developer,

You know English is the international language and accepted as international communication. So, most of the websites have been developed in English. But in many other times, a developer needs to work with local languages where they are developing a website in PHP. If you develop in local language, you need to know a small trick and that will show your content properly in all browsers smoothly.

So, what is the technique?

Well. Let me explain step by step.

Step One: An observation
I will show you the source code of two Bengali newspaper. In this newspaper: http://www.prothom-alo.com, the fonts and text comes properly in all browsers. But in this newspaper: http://www.ittefaq.com, it can show text and fonts properly only in Internet Explorer.

Now the matter is we must make sure our content will be displayed properly in any browser. Right?

OK. So what is the difference between the two websites I just gave example?

If you take a look at the source code of the first website’s content, you will find it is like this:সઃপাদক

This is another website that had been developed as smooth site in the same technique: http://www.bdnews24.com/bangla. If you check its code, you will see that it uses same type of code for its text.

So, what are these পাদকীয় things? It is very interesting that these are universal representation of local language in HTML entities. For every character of any local language, there is a unique and fixed symbol defined such as প in HTML entities. When you bring this kind of text in your browser source code, the site content looks smooth without any break and fonts displays properly.

Now if you open the source code of http://www.ittefaq.com, you will see something like AvR beg RvZxq msm` wbe©vP‡b jovB n‡e †RvU-gnv‡Rv‡Ui g‡a¨. The matter is they are also showing Bengali news content, but in a different way that is not useful in cross-broswer platform. This is often totally recognized by only Internet Explorer and often partially recognized by other browsers.

Step Two: Storing your local language content in the database
You see I have some content in my local language (Bangla) in the database.

Step Three: Converting your local language text in Universal code
Well. This is extremely easy.

<?php
	class UnicodeHandler
	{
		var $dbLink;
		var $sqlQuery;
		var $dbResult;
		var $dbRow;
		var $salary;
		var $bonus;
		/* Use this constructor in case your PHP version is 4. */
/*
		function UnicodeHandler()
		{
			$this->dbLink = '';
			$this->sqlQuery = '';
			$this->dbResult = '';
			$this->dbRow = '';
			$this->mySalary = 0;
			$this->myBonus = 0;
			$this->dbLink = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', '');
			mysql_query("SET character_set_results=utf8", $this->dbLink);
			mb_language('uni');
			mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
			mysql_select_db('test', $this->dbLink);
			mysql_query("set names 'utf8'",$this->dbLink);
		}
*/
		/* Use this constructor in case your PHP version is 5 or 5+. */
		/* I assume you are using PHP 5 or 5+. */
		function __construct()
		{
			$this->dbLink = '';
			$this->sqlQuery = '';
			$this->dbResult = '';
			$this->dbRow = '';
			$this->mySalary = 0;
			$this->myBonus = 0;
			$this->dbLink = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', '');
			mysql_query("SET character_set_results=utf8", $this->dbLink);
			mb_language('uni');
			mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
			mysql_select_db('test', $this->dbLink);
			mysql_query("set names 'utf8'",$this->dbLink);
		}
		function displayLocalContent()
		{
			mysql_query("SET character_set_results=utf8", $this->dbLink);
			$this->sqlQuery = "SELECT * FROM unitext ";
			$this->dbResult = mysql_query($this->sqlQuery, $this->dbLink);
			while($this->dbRow = mysql_fetch_object($this->dbResult))
			{
				echo 'News: ' . $this->convertToLocalHtml($this->dbRow->news) . '<br />';
			}
		}
		function convertToLocalHtml($localHtmlEquivalent)
		{
			$localHtmlEquivalent = mb_convert_encoding($localHtmlEquivalent,"HTML-ENTITIES","UTF-8");
			return $localHtmlEquivalent;
		}
	}
?>

The displayLocalContent() function is going to display the news and convertToLocalHtml() function converts my utf-8 content to HTML entities.

And here in index.php I am executing my displayLocalContent() function.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Displaying Your Local Language</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
	include_once 'class.unicode.php';
	$unicodeObject = new UnicodeHandler();
	$unicodeObject->displayLocalContent();
?>
</body>
</html>

As a result, the output is now as ঢাকা, ডিসে etc.

Step Four: You need to check my other posting for SELECT, INSERT & UPDATE your local language.
Here goes my other article so that you can perform all required operations for storing and displaying information in browser smoothly:
http://www.tanzilo.com/2008/10/13/php-mysql-unicode-solution-to-chinese-russian-or-any-language/

An alternative way
I have an alternative way in my mind and that is when you store the data in the database, you can first convert them to universal code such as কীয়and then directly show your text.

This article will cover any language such as Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Aymara, Azeri, Belarusian, Bengali, Bislama, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Chinese, Mandarin,Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dhivehi, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian,  Gagauz, Georgian, German, Greek, Guaraní, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hiri Motu, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Māori, Marathi, Mayan, Moldovan, Mongolian, Montenegrin,Náhuatl, Ndebele, Nepali, New Zealand Sign Language, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Oriya, Papiamento, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Rhaeto-Romansh, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovene, Somali, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swati, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Tetum, Thai, Tok Pisin, Tsonga, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Venda, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yiddish, Zulu etc.

You can also download this small piece of code from here:
http://www.tanzilo.com/demo/code/convert_to_unicode/convert_to_unicode.zip

Thank you for reading.