language translation using array

Hello Ross,

Thank you for your help and your time on this.

I changed some things i the script you provide so i can make it work in my case:

function translation($keyphrase) {
    $language = $_SESSION['language'];
    $translation = mysql_select("language", "keystr = '$keyphrase'"); $trans = @$translation[0];
    return $trans['title_'.$language];
}


Its working exactly like i imagined!

I have one more question; my translation table in the database is for no more than 500 records.

What is faster for the server when calculate php and mysql:
- load the whole translation table at the head of every page and find the keyphrases than  return the translation in the memory or
- select every time from the translation table with mysql select (like in this solution)?

Thank you again,
Karls

Hi Karlz, 

What is faster for the server when calculate php and mysql:
- load the whole translation table at the head of every page and find the keyphrases than  return the translation in the memory or
- select every time from the translation table with mysql select (like in this solution)?

You'd need to test it to know for sure but I'd try loading them all into memory.

Also, be sure to escape any input to mysql: 

    $translation = mysql_select("language", "keystr = '" .mysql_real_escape_string($keyphrase). "'");

Hope that helps! 

Hello Dave,

Thank you for your reply and
Can you give me some guidelines to modify this function to make it work from loaded array?

I assume first i need to load the translation table to array and then find with foreach...

Thank you in advance,
Karls

HI Karlz, 

Can you give me some guidelines to modify this function to make it work from loaded array?

I assume first i need to load the translation table to array and then find with foreach...

You'll have to experiment to figure out exact code, but you here's a code snippet to load $records the first time a function is called and have it available after that without reloading.

// load $records the first time this function is called
static $records;
if (!isset($records)) { $records = mysql_select('your_table_name'); }  // 

The PHP keyword "static" basically means "remember the value of this variable the next time this function is called".  PHP Docs: http://php.net/manual/en/language.variables.scope.php#language.variables.scope.static

So basically the first time the function is called it will load $records and then it will be available after that without needing to be reloaded.

Hope that helps!

Hello Dave,

thank you for your help, that was exactly what i needed i think.

I came up with this and its working.

function translate($keyphrase) {
    static $transRecords;
    if(!isset($transRecords)) { $transRecords = mysql_select('language'); }
    $language = $_SESSION['language'];
    
    for($i=0; $i<sizeof($transRecords); $i++)
    {
        $row = @$transRecords[$i];
        if($row['keystr'] === $keyphrase )
            return $row['title_'.$language];       
    }
}

Please review the above script if you have more time on this.

Thank you again,
Karls

Hi Karlz, 

Looks good!  If there's not too many language records and it's fast enough on the server I'd just leave it as is.  

If you want to make it faster you could try create an associative array of keystring values to records so you didn't need to loop over them every time.  PHP's associative array lookup code is likely a lot faster.  We actually have a utility function that does that called array_groupBy().  So your code might be something like this (untested): 

function translate($keyphrase) {
    static $transRecords;
    if(!isset($transRecords)) {
      $transRecords = mysql_select('language');
      $transRecordsByKeystr = array_groupBy($transRecords, 'keystr');
    }

    return @$transRecordsByKeystr[$keyphrase][ 'title_' . @$_SESSION['language'] ];
}

Hope that helps, let me know if that works.  

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your reply.

I tried the suggested array_groupBy() solution to achieve better performance but it working only for the first call of the function, on every other calls in the same page, nothing returns.

Karls

Hi Karlz,

Sorry, we'll need to make that new variable static too.  Try this:

static $transRecords;
static $transRecordsByKeystr;

Hope that helps!