Multilingual Language Lists for Laravel

Introduction

Over the years, many of the projects I've worked on have resulted in multilingual sites. During that time the number of languages typically supported has increased and the sensitivty to the importance of dialectical differences has improved, which are good things.

The purpose of this package is to make managing language lists, such as those used in language pulldowns or form select fields easier to generate via a simple API that gives access to an industry-maintained list.

Data can be returned as a lookup array or an array of key-value pairs, where both the key and value labels can be set according to the needs of the software consuming them.

Installation

At the command line run

composer require petercoles/multilingual-language-list

If you're using Laravel 5.5 or later (and haven't disabled package discovery), you're done. Move on to the usage section below.

If you're using an older version of Laravel, then add the service provider to the providers entry in your config/app.php file

    'providers' => [
        // ...
        PeterColes\Languages\LanguagesServiceProvider::class,
        // ...
    ],

An optional facade is also available and can be enabled by adding the following to you config/app.php's aliases array

'Languages' => PeterColes\Languages\LanguagesFacade::class,

Usage

Once installed the package exposes two API methods: lookup() and keyValue(), each of which returns a list of countries ordered by the country name in the language being used.

Lookup

The lookup method takes three optional parameters and returns a collection.

• $filter determines which languages are to be included in the response. It defaults to "major", which will cause a list of only those languages with a two letter code to be returned (e.g. fr - French). Other options are "minor" which will add languages with three letter codes (e.g. arw - Arawak) and "all", which is not recommended and will return every possible entry including some dialects (e.g. es_MX - Mexican Spanish) and constructs (e.g. es_419 - Latin American Spanish).
• $locale determines the language and dialect in which the response will be returned. Locales can be languages (e.g. fr - French), dialects (e.g. fr_CA - Canadian French) and specials (e.g. bs_Cryl_BA - cryllic script for the dialect of Bosnian from Bosnia and Herzegovina or zh_Hans_HK - Simplified Chinese for the Hong Kong Dialect). They look rather like languages, but are more nuanced, i.e. there's a whole lot more of them.
• $flip to switch the key and value for the response array so that the language name becomes the key and the language code becomes the value.

The resulting collection will be cast to a json object by Laravel if returned as a response, or can be cast to an array if needed with the toArray() method.

Example: Default settigs

Languages::lookup();

// returns

{
  "ab": "Abkhazian",
  ...
  "zu": "Zulu"
}

Example: Limiting the languages displayed

Languages::lookup(['en', 'fr', 'de']);

// returns

{
  "en": "English",
  "fr": "French",
  "de": "German"
}

Example: Changing the display language

Languages::lookup(['en', 'fr', 'de'], 'fr');

// returns

{
  "de": "allemand",
  "en": "anglais",
  "fr": "français"
}

Example: Reverse lookups

Languages::lookup(['en', 'fr', 'de'], 'fr', true);

// returns

{
  "allemand": "de",
  "anglais": "en",
  "français": "fr"
}

Example: Non-latin character sets are supported too

Languages::lookup(['en', 'fr', 'de', 'bs'], 'bs_Cyrl');

// returns

{
  "bs": "босански",
  "en": "енглески",
  "de": "немачки",
  "fr": "француски"
}

keyValue

The keyValue method takes four optional parameters:

• $filter - default "major". See lookup section for full explanation
• $locale - default "en". See lookup section for full explanation
• $key - default "key"
• $value - default "value"

Example: Default settings

Languages::keyValue();

// returns

[
  {"key": "ab", "value": "Abkhazian"},
  {"key": "aa", "value": "Afar"},
  ...
  {"key": "za", "value": "Zhuang"},
  {"key": "zu", "value": "Zulu"}
]

Example: Include "minor" languages

Languages::keyValue('minor');

// returns

[
  {"key": "ab", "value": "Abkhazian"},
  {"key": "ace", "value": "Achinese"},
  {"key": "ach", "value": "Acoli"},
  ...
  {"key": "gbz", "value": "Zoroastrian Dari"},
  {"key": "zu", "value": "Zulu"},
  {"key": "zun", "value": "Zuni"}
]

Example: The kitchen sink - custom list, in non-Latin language with custom indices

Languages::keyValue(['en', 'ja', 'zh'], 'zh', 'label', 'text');

// returns

[
  {"label": "ja", "text": "日文"},
  {"label": "en", "text": "英文"},
  {"label": "zh", "text": "中文"}
]

Mixed Locales

Sometimes you might want to display a list of languages where each language is expressed in its own language and writing system e.g. one list with French as français, Japanese as 日本語 and Russian as русский. If so, we've got you covered.

By using the special "mixed" locale as the second parameter and a custom array as the first, the languages in that custom array will each be rendered in their own localised form, in the order given in the first parameter.

Example: lookup

Languages::lookup(['en', 'fr', 'de', 'ja', 'ru', 'zh'], 'mixed');

// returns

{
  "en": "English",
  "fr": "français",
  "de": "Deutsch",
  "ja": "日本語",
  "ru": "русский",
  "zh": "中文",
}

Example: key-value

Languages::keyValue(['en', 'fr', 'de', 'ja', 'ru', 'zh'], 'mixed');

// returns

[
  {"key" => "en", "value" => "English"},
  {"key" => "fr", "value" => "français"},
  {"key" => "de", "value" => "Deutsch"},
  {"key" => "ja", "value" => "日本語"},
  {"key" => "ru", "value" => "русский"},
  {"key" => "zh", "value" => "中文"}
]

As seen above, the mixed locale parameter can be used for generating lookups or key-value objects. The $flip, $key and $value parameters continue to work for the relevant list type in the same way as shown in the earlier sections.

Issues

This package was developed to meet a specific need and then generalised for wider use. If you have a use case not currently met, or see something that appears to not be working correctly, please raise an issue at the github repo.

License

This package is licensed under the MIT license.