Reputation: 7906

Build a website in Arabic language

I saw a website like this i.e. http://www.a3malcom.com/index.php. I want to build same kind of website in Arabic website. I was wondering does entries into database table also needs to be done in Arabic or English?

What if i need the website in 2 languages i.e. english and arabic. In what language should data should be entered in DB.

Upvotes: 0

Answers (3)

Rolf

Reputation: 5743

Usually unicode is all that is needed (UTF-8).

Your source file should be encoded UTF-8 if you want to write arabic in the PHP source. Note that some text editors don't support arabic properly.

For the database, just create your database with UTF-8 encoding.

For HTML output, add this to your HEAD section:

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />

Alternatively, you can send it as HTTP header... but why bother.

Anyway, I have encoutered a problem generating Arabic sentences as images in GD - using a custom font. Turns out GD doesn't render arabic properly (at least in my case).

That was solved using the following library:

http://ar-php.org/

(yes the website is pretty ugly, but the library works, is well packaged, contains documentation...)

All I had to do, in my case, to fix the problem, is:

$Arabic = new I18N_Arabic('Glyphs');
$text = $Arabic->utf8Glyphs($_GET['txt']);

And then feed $text to GD. I'm encountering a minor problem with text direction, though, and looking for a solution. But at least I have valid arabic now.

But in most cases you won't need that library, but will just need to make sure that you're using UTF-8 in all your development process.

Hope it helps.

Upvotes: 0