In Part 2 you gained more insight into using the gettext library by learning the most important functions of the extension. In this part you'll learn how to best use a fallback locale, switch between locales, and override the currently selected message domain.

They show you how to set up the directory structure to handle a fallback locale, a choice to use when the system can't determine which to use. By using a default, you also avoid having the system translate from the default language to...the default language (like "English" to "English"). Included are also the code bits you'll need to switch between locales (just using a different domain) and using the dgettext function to specify a different domain than the selected one.

It turns out basename does a bit more than just splicing the string at the last slash, because it's locale aware. In my case I was dealing with a multi-byte UTF-8 string. It took me quite some time figuring out what was going on, because I was testing from the console which had the en_US.UTF-8 locale, and the bug was appearing on Apache, which defaults to the C locale.

He includes an example snippet of code showing how it can work with both the default (well, for Apache anyway) of the "C" locale versus the "UTF-8" locale and return different results for the same urldecoded information.

You can find the "word" generic character type used in a lot of PHP code including the Zend Framework. The problem is that the assumption above is incorrect. Now, most of the time these act identically because PHP is compiled using its own packaged PCRE library. However, I've seen more than once systems where this is not the case. Usually in some non-English capacity where additional locale support was considered necessary or standard practice.

The problem comes when PHP is compiled against a custom PCRE library, making it more locale-aware. He gives instructions on how to get this to a testable state on your environment (using an updated PREC library) and get it working for characters in French, like the accented "a" or "e".

For many of us, the realization of the extent of countries' interdependence was driven home by the recent global economic meltdown. So what does all this have to do with us Web developers? It's a resounding wake up call that we have to think of other nationalities when we develop our websites and applications. In most cases, developing a web app in English alienates much of the world's population and greatly reduces potential profits! With that in mind, this article is the kickoff for a series that discusses the ramifications of globalization on our websites and applications.

The look at some of the local identifiers (like LC_ALL, LC_TIME, LC_ADDRESS and LANG), how to access the values for them on the different OSes and how to use the I18N_Country and I18N_Language packages from the PEAR I18N package to handle some simple multi-language support.

Yesterday, I released Solar 0.27.0, then quick-fixed two minor bugs and released 0.27.1 an hour later. It feels so good to be back doing releases on a monthly basis.

Some of the updates/changes in these new releases include:

• The use of spl_autolaod to load classes
• Locale functions have a new home
• a super-fast JSON encoder/decoder
• a modification to the SQL adapter for PDO
• A new bit of functionality in Solar_Url that can find the ".ext" filename extension in a URL automagically

Andre Hoffmann posted a blog entry today to talk about his work on Zend_Locale_UTF8: "I just released the first version of Zend_Locale_UTF8.It doesn't come with all functions nor with the best performance, but it shows how the current state of development is."

He also lists some of the things still missing from the component, including: unit tests, substr, strstr, PHP6 support, and mbstring support.

As a result of all the noise about UTF-8, got an email from Marek Gayer with some very smart tips on handling UTF-8. What follows is a discussion illustrating what happens when you get obsessed with performance and optimizations (be warned - may be boring, depending on your perspective).

He talks mainly about using the native PHP functionality to avoid the mbstring issues that could arise by restricting locale behavior and using a fast case conversion function to handle strings correctly. The other tip involves delivery methods to those not able to recieve UTF-8 formatted content - checking their character set and responding accordingly.