Re: Translating PHP error messages (fwd)

At 21:20 21/12/2000, ghislain Seguy wrote:

My mother tongue is not English, and sometimes, it may help a lot to have localized version : everyone's using PHP is not core developper. I definitely think that some people who just use PHP for their web site, with only low level of programming could be confused when they run into some "flex scanner error". I was comparing with MySQL error reporting system, and it is worth a look : They have (1) an error code, (2) the description of the error With (1), every body can spot in a snap any error you mention, and description may be translated into any language : All we need. That's the way I see it, from where everybody don't speak english all day round. This is not such an effort to deal numbers to errors, and get a message catalogue, while it may add real value to PHP. -D

Very often, it'd be exactly the difference between dumping a problem report and figuring it out. In my opinion, the common-ground (the error message text) should be in a language everyone understands, and English is the closest as it gets to such a language. For those for which figuring out the meaning of English error messages is difficult, we can have an errorcode based system as I suggested the other day (the multilingual error text will not be built into PHP, but will reside in the documentation). By the way, the error you quoted (input in flex scanner failed or something like that) is simply an error coming from a lower layer that PHP uses. It's not more understandable in English than it is in other language - the problem with this particular error is that nobody ever took the time to catch it and rephrase it nicely. This is the exception to the rule though. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> CTO & co-founder, Zend Technologies Ltd. http://www.zend.com/