set cookie to remember language choice

I have a dual language website (English/Russian) which has a language selection dropdown in the header of every page:

<ul>
<li class="active"><a href="/en/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])?>">ENGLISH</a></li>
<li><a href="/ru/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])?>">РУССКИЙ</a></li>
</ul>

Visitors are currently automatically redirected to domain.com/en/ via the .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ en [L]

If the visitor then chooses Russian, how would I go about setting a cookie to remember this choice for their next visit? Would I
need to alter the .htaccess file as well?

You could add another url parameter to trigger the cookie setting like:

<ul>

<li class="active"><a href="/en/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])?>?lang=en">ENGLISH</a></li>

<li><a href="/ru/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])?>?lang=ru">РУССКИЙ</a></li>

</ul>

Then add an include to the top of each page that uses the webassist server behavior to set a cookie value when the remember url parameter is present.

In the same include you can add code to redirect to the correct language if the cookie is set. The include file will look something like:

<?php

if ((isset($_GET['lang']) && $_GET['lang'] != "")) {

    setcookie("langpref", "".$_GET['lang']  ."", time()+(60*60*24*30), "/", "", 0);

}

?>

<?php 

if (isset($_COOKIE['langpref'])) {

    if (strpos($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'],$_COOKIE['langpref']) === false) {

      header("location: /" . $_COOKIE['langpref'] ."/". basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']));

    }

}

?>

Works like a dream, thank you Ray!

Hi Ray, further to the above, our client now wants to send out an email with a list of links to both the English and Russian pages of the site. However, they've discovered that something weird is happening with the URL parameter, but not on all the pages, which is very strange because all pages use the same shared header.php file which contains the cookie. Could you take a look and let me know what might be causing this? Details in PM.

Try this in the include file:

<?php

if ((isset($_GET['lang']) && $_GET['lang'] != "")) {

    setcookie("langpref", "".$_GET['lang']  ."", time()+(60*60*24*30), "/", "", 0);

    $_COOKIE['langpref'] = $_GET['lang'];

}

?>

<?php 

if (isset($_COOKIE['langpref'])) {

    if (strpos($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'],$_COOKIE['langpref']) === false) {

      header("location: /" . $_COOKIE['langpref'] ."/". basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']));

    }

}

?>

That seems to work OK for me, thanks!

This language switch code is very helpful and I am using in my multilingual menu:

<ul>
<li class="active"><a href="/en/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])?>">ENGLISH</a></li>
<li><a href="/de/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])?>">GERMAN</a></li>
<li><a href="/fr/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])?>">FRENCH</a></li>
</ul>

which is O.K. for static pages.

However, when the page is dynamically served such as:
swissart_news.php?article_id=352

The language switch works but the dynamic content is not loaded.

Is it possible to optimize the code to enable this?

I know this is not a specific WA issue but many thanks for any help.

Can you try:

<?php

parse_str($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], $vars);

$query = http_build_query($vars);

if ($query) $query = "?" . $query;

?>

<ul>

<li class="active"><a href="/en/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']).$query ?>">ENGLISH</a></li>

<li><a href="/de/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']).$query ?>">GERMAN</a></li>

<li><a href="/fr/<?php echo basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']).$query ?>">FRENCH</a></li>

</ul>

Works like magic!

Many thanks Ray