Internationalizing the a website, you run into a problem where you don’t know what strings you’ve parsed out for localization or not.

For these tasks, my favorite language is “zxx.” I use that code to replace all strings with some XX’s. Now any strings (or images) I missed are immediately evident.

Keeping the zxx localization file up to date is easy to update…

// {{{ l10n_upgrader($pofile,$callback)
/**
 * Allows you to upgrade a PO file automatically.
 *
 * Search for all "" (two double quotes) and translate these.
 *
 * @param string $pofile the messages.po file to upgrade
 * @param string $callback the callback function that does the string lookup
 * @return array
 */
function l10n_upgrader($pofile,$callback='')
{
    if ($callback) {
        $data = file_get_contents($pofile);
        $matches = array();
        $data = preg_replace_callback("!^msgid "(.+?)"nmsgstr ""!m", $callback, $data); // if I add s it matches too aggressively
        //unlink($pofile);
        file_put_contents($pofile,$data);
    }
    // generate output
    //msgfmt message.po
    $exec = sprintf(
        'cd %s;msgfmt %s',
        escapeshellarg(dirname($pofile)),
        escapeshellarg('messages.po')
    );
   pass($exec); //erroring out this is an exec function
}
// }}}
// {{{ l10n_ZXXer($matches)
/**
 * Add a bunch of XXXX's to a string
 *
 * @param array $matches
 * @return string
 */
function l10n_ZXXer($matches)
{
    return sprintf(
        "msgid "%s"nmsgstr "%s"",
        $matches[1],
        str_pad('',strlen($matches[1]),'XXXX ')
    );
}
// }}}
l10n_upgrader($gt_dird.'zxx_XX/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po', 'l10n_ZXXer');

You may have some trouble getting things working, so remember that gettext uses your system to set the language. If your system doesn’t have zxx installed, you can’t just flip your locale over and expect it to work. As a quick hack for develement, just symlink the directory in your dev machine over to a language you aren’t using. I’m currently using “zu_ZA” which will be okay until Tagged localizes for Zulu.

Also remember that your web server caches gettext strings, so be sure to shut down the webserver to free the file lock before updating your .pot file.

Improving your linguisticness

l10n_ZXXer() above is not that clever. It won’t handle the cases where you have nested sprintf() substitutions. But you can imagine improving it. Here are some ideas of different fake languages:

• Multiply strlen() computation by 1.2 in order to handle spacing issues for localizing to German.
• Replace many of the letters with the letters in the cyrillic alphabet. This way you know unicode is correctly supported. Don’t replace all of them so your pattern replace can be easier and strings don’t get smashed.
  
• Replace the code to run it through a filter so it’s linguistically recognizable. Maybe turn your site into 133t-speak. Personally, I used ebonics from my Plaxo days. Careful though, while it is amusing to see your website littered with argot, fo’ shizzle. Apparently, I was committing a lot of cuss words into the code base. It’s times like that you’re grateful for the symlink trick above preventing your users from stumbling on these fake languages.
  
• Replace the strings with a zombie filter. RRRghgghghh! Brainz! Plus it’d be nice when you’re the only usable website after the zombie-pocalypse.
• Replace the strings with a Pirate filter. Besides not taking sides,in the age-old dilemma, you’ll have something ready to ship for the moment the CEO becomes the last person in the company to figure out that there is an International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Aye! Прeттч soon ARRZn’HG Brains! XXXXXX wiff da bomb o’ us all ye damn hood ratz. 🙂