amplifiedlabs

Static-PHP i18n at OVH scale

An i18n stack that works on cheap shared hosting where Apache’s mod_rewrite [QSA] flag mysteriously drops query strings (yes, really — OVH).

The trick

Two functions: lang() and t(). lang() figures out the requested language by:

1. Reading ?lang= from the query string
2. Falling back to URL path parsing (/pt/..., /es/...)
3. Defaulting to English

t(key) reads a shared dictionary (ui-strings.php) and returns the right translation. Falls back to the EN string, then to the key itself.

On the client, a tiny i18n.js rewrites <a href="/foo"> to <a href="/pt/foo"> after page load when lang() === 'pt'. Keeps links sane without forcing PHP to generate them dynamically everywhere.

No frameworks. No build step. Works on any PHP 7.4+ host that has mb_* extensions enabled.

Files

• lang.php — server helpers
• ui-strings.php — EN/PT/ES dict, one big array

Featured on

https://amplifiedcreations.com/lab/static-php-i18n-ovh

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