The London Perl and Raku Workshop takes place on 26th Oct 2024. If your company depends on Perl, please consider sponsoring and/or attending.

NAME

CGI::Lingua - Natural language choices for CGI programs

VERSION

Version 0.36

SYNOPSIS

No longer does your website need to be in English only. CGI::Lingua provides a simple basis to determine which language to display a website. The website tells CGI::Lingua which languages it supports. Based on that list CGI::Lingua tells the application which language the user would like to use.

    use CGI::Lingua;
    # ...
    my $l = CGI::Lingua->new(supported => ['en', 'fr', 'en-gb', 'en-us']);
    my $language = $l->language();
    if ($language eq 'English') {
       print '<P>Hello</P>';
    } elsif($language eq 'French') {
        print '<P>Bonjour</P>';
    } else {    # $language eq 'Unknown'
        my $rl = $l->requested_language();
        print "<P>Sorry for now this page is not available in $rl.</P>";
    }
    my $c = $l->country();
    if ($c eq 'us') {
      # print contact details in the US
    } elsif ($c eq 'ca') {
      # print contact details in Canada
    } else {
      # print worldwide contact details
    }

    # ...

    use CHI;
    use CGI::Lingua;
    # ...
    my $cache = CHI->new(driver => 'File', root_dir => '/tmp/cache', namespace => 'CGI::Lingua-countries');
    my $l = CGI::Lingua->new(supported => ['en', 'fr'], cache => $cache);

SUBROUTINES/METHODS

new

Creates a CGI::Lingua object.

Takes one mandatory parameter: a list of languages, in RFC-1766 format, that the website supports. Language codes are of the form primary-code [ - country-code ] e.g. 'en', 'en-gb' for English and British English respectively.

For a list of primary-codes refer to ISO-639 (e.g. 'en' for English). For a list of country-codes refer to ISO-3166 (e.g. 'gb' for United Kingdom).

    # We support English, French, British and American English, in that order
    my $l = CGI::Lingua(supported => [('en', 'fr', 'en-gb', 'en-us')]);

Takes optional parameter, an object which is used to cache Whois lookups. This cache object will be an instantiation of a class that understands get and set, such as CHI.

Takes an optional boolean parameter syslog, to log messages to Sys::Syslog.

Takes an optional parameter dont_use_ip. By default, if none of the requested languages are supported, CGI::Lingua->language() looks in the IP address for the language to use. This may be not what you want, so use this option to disable the feature.

language

Tells the CGI application what language to display its messages in. The language is the natural name e.g. 'English' or 'Japanese'.

Sublanguages are handled sensibly, so that if a client requests U.S. English on a site that only serves British English, language() will return 'English'.

    # Site supports English and British English
    my $l = CGI::Lingua->new(supported => ['en', 'fr', 'en-gb']);

    # If the browser requests 'en-us' , then language will be 'English' and
    # sublanguage will be undefined because we weren't able to satisy the
    # request

    # Site supports British English only
    my $l = CGI::Lingua->new(supported => ['fr', 'en-gb']);

    # If the browser requests 'en-us' , then language will be 'English' and
    # sublanguage will also be undefined, which may streem strange, but it
    # ensures that sites behave sensibly.

name

Synonym for language, for compatibility with Local::Object::Language

sublanguage

Tells the CGI what variant to use e.g. 'United Kingdom'.

code_alpha2

Gives the two character representation of the supported language, e.g. 'en' when you've asked for en-gb.

sublanguage_code_alpha2

Gives the two character representation of the supported language, e.g. 'gb' when you've asked for en-gb.

requested_language

Gives a human readable rendition of what language the user asked for whether or not it is supported.

country

Returns the two character country code of the remote end. This only does a Whois lookup, but it is useful to have this method so that it can use the cache.

locale

HTTP doesn't have a way of transmitting a browser's localisation information which would be useful for default currency, date formatting etc.

This method attempts to detect the information, but it is a best guess and is not 100% reliable. But it's better than nothing ;-)

Returns a Locale::Object::Country object.

To be clear, if you're in the US and request the language in Spanish, and the site supports it, language() will return 'Spanish', and locale() will try to return the Locale::Object::Country for the US.

AUTHOR

Nigel Horne, <njh at bandsman.co.uk>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-cgi-lingua at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=CGI-Lingua. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

SEE ALSO

Locale::Country::Object HTTP::BrowserDetect

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

    perldoc CGI::Lingua

You can also look for information at:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2010-2011 Nigel Horne.

This program is released under the following licence: GPL