When you want to detect if a given input, regardless of its source, is a locale you
should use the static isLocale() method. The first parameter of
this method is the string which you want to check.
Example 544. Simple locale detection
<?php
$input = 'to_RU';
if (Zend_Locale::isLocale($input)) {
print "'{$input}' is a locale";
} else {
print "Sorry... the given input is no locale";
}
As you can see, the output of this method is always a boolean. There is only one reason
you could get an exception when calling this method. When your system does not provide
any locale and Zend Framework is not able to detect it automatically. Normally this
shows that there is a problem with your OS in combination with PHP's
setlocale().
You should also note that any given locale string will automatically be degraded if the
region part does not exist for this locale. In our previous example the language
'to' does not exist in the region 'RU', but
you will still get TRUE returned as
Zend_Locale can work with the given input.
Still it's sometimes useful to prevent this automatic degrading, and this is where the
second parameter of isLocale() comes in place. The
strict parameter defaults to FALSE and can be
used to prevent degrading when set to TRUE.
Example 545. Strict locale detection
<?php
$input = 'to_RU';
if (Zend_Locale::isLocale($input, true)) {
print "'{$input}' is a locale";
} else {
print "Sorry... the given input is no locale";
}
Now that you are able to detect if a given string is a locale you could add locale aware behaviour to your own classes. But you will soon detect that this always leads to the same 15 lines of code. Something like the following example:
Example 546. Implement locale aware behaviour
<?php
if ($locale === null) {
$locale = new Zend_Locale();
}
if (!Zend_Locale::isLocale($locale, true, false)) {
if (!Zend_Locale::isLocale($locale, false, false)) {
throw new Zend_Locale_Exception(
"The locale '$locale' is no known locale");
}
$locale = new Zend_Locale($locale);
}
if ($locale instanceof Zend_Locale) {
$locale = $locale->toString();
}
With Zend Framework 1.8 we added a static findLocale() method
which returns a locale string which you can work with. It processes the following
tasks:
Detects if a given string is a locale
Degrades the locale if it does not exist in the given region
Upgrades the locale when it is detected as region without language
Returns a previous set application wide locale if no input is given
Detects the locale from browser when the previous detections failed
Detects the locale from environment when the previous detections failed
Detects the locale from framework when the previous detections failed
Returns always a string which represents the found locale.
The following example shows how these checks and the above code can be simplified with one single call:
Example 547. Locale aware behaviour as with Zend Framework 1.8
<?php
$locale = Zend_Locale::findLocale($inputstring);