How to debug gettext not working in PHP?

Question

i am trying to use the php gettext extension in php 5.5 (on win2008 server, using IIS7). I am doing this:

<?php

$locale = "es";
if (isSet($_GET["locale"])) $locale = $_GET["locale"];
putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
bindtextdomain("messages", "./locale");
textdomain("messages");

echo gettext("Hello world");

?>

With this folder structure in place:

locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/messages.mo

But it always just returns Hello world and not the correct translation which for now (based on my lack of spanish skills) is this in the messages.po file:

msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: TestXlations\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2014-04-19 08:15-0500\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2014-04-19 09:18-0500\n"
"Language-Team: \n"
"Language: es\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"X-Generator: Poedit 1.6.3\n"
"X-Poedit-Basepath: .\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"
"X-Poedit-SearchPath-0: c:/dev\n"

msgid "Hello world"
msgstr "Hola World"

This fails from the cmd line and via IIS. So i it's seeing the gettext call, etc and executing it but it's not reading the translation file. how can i debug this further? even if remove the translation file, i get the same behavior.

Answer 1

You should check returned values and know which function failed. It is not i18n specific but useful for any PHP scripts, or any programming language debugging.

<?php
$locale = 'es';
if (isset($_GET["locale"])) $locale = $_GET["locale"];

$domain = 'messages';

$results = putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
if (!$results) {
    exit ('putenv failed');
}

// http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/39cwe7zf%28v=vs.100%29.aspx
$results = setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale, 'spanish');
if (!$results) {
    exit ('setlocale failed: locale function is not available on this platform, or the given local does not exist in this environment');
}

$results = bindtextdomain($domain, "./locales");
echo 'new text domain is set: ' . $results. "\n";

$results = textdomain($domain);
echo 'current message domain is set: ' . $results. "\n";

$results = gettext("Hello world");
if ($results === "Hello world") {
    echo "Original English was returned. Something wrong\n";
}
echo $results . "\n";