Multiple languages in cakephp using 2-letter instead of 3-letter in URL

I am putting together a multilingual site according to the tutorial: http://nuts-and-bolts-of-cakephp.com/2008/11/28/cakephp-url-based-language-switching-for-i18n-and-l10n-internationalization-and-localization/

However, the tutorial uses three letter notation for different languages (eng, rus) and I would like to use two letters only.

I changed config/core.php

Configure::write('Config.language', 'en');

then also config/routes.php

Router::connect('/:language/:controller/:action/*', array(), array('language' => '[a-z]{2}'));

and also the path to:

locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/default.po
locale/ru/LC_MESSAGES/default.po

but it is still not working. Strings turn out as their default and not read from the .po files.

The .po files, i got from runing cake i18n to generate one single .pot file that i then renamed to .po and copied in each directory for each language.

the .po files are utf-8 encoded.

i also have in my config/bootstrap.php:

Configure::write('Config.languages', array(
    'en' => array(
    'language' => 'English',
    'locale' => 'en',
    'localeFallback' => 'en',
    'charset' => 'utf-8'
    ),
    'bg' =&开发者_C百科gt; array(
    'language' => 'Bulgarian',
    'locale' => 'bg',
    'localeFallback' => 'bg',
    'charset' => 'utf-8'
    ),
)
);

What am i missing?

You don't have to change the i18n internals just to change how the URLs look like. Leave everything else alone except the route configuration and at the start of _setLanguage() function convert the 2-letter language codes to 3-letter codes. (_setLanguage() being the function mentioned in the tutorial you linked to.)

For example, if you know that you'll be supporting only 2-3 languages it's easiest to do the conversion manually:

function _setLanguage() {
    if ($this->Cookie->read('lang') && !$this->Session->check('Config.language')) {
        $this->Session->write('Config.language', $this->Cookie->read('lang'));
    }
    else if (isset($this->params['language']) && ($this->params['language']
             !=  $this->Session->read('Config.language'))) {

// ADD THIS
        switch( $this->params['language'] ) {
            case 'bg':
                $lang = 'bul';
                break;
            case 'en':
            default:
                $lang = 'eng';
                break;
        }

        $this->Session->write('Config.language', $lang);
        $this->Cookie->write('lang', $lang, false, '20 days');
    }
}

Now everything will work using 3-letter language codes under the hood but you can provide 2-letter codes to the user.

I find very interesting also the possibility to AUTO discover user's browser lang.

You may add an additional option this way:

...

}elseif(isset($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"])){
    if (ereg("bg", $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]))
        $lang = 'bul';
    if (ereg("en", $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]))
        $lang = 'eng';
}