How to Work with the User's Locale

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Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 7.1 (the current stable version).

The locale of the current user is stored in the request and is accessible via the Request object:

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        use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

public function indexAction(Request $request)
{
    $locale = $request->getLocale();
}
    

To set the user's locale, you may want to create a custom event listener so that it's set before any other parts of the system (i.e. the translator) need it:

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        public function onKernelRequest(GetResponseEvent $event)
{
    $request = $event->getRequest();

    // some logic to determine the $locale
    $request->setLocale($locale);
}
    

Read Making the Locale "Sticky" during a User's Session for more information on making the user's locale "sticky" to their session.

Note

Setting the locale using $request->setLocale() in the controller is too late to affect the translator. Either set the locale via a listener (like above), the URL (see next) or call setLocale() directly on the translator service.

See the How to Work with the User's Locale section below about setting the locale via routing.

The Locale and the URL

Since you can store the locale of the user in the session, it may be tempting to use the same URL to display a resource in different languages based on the user's locale. For example, http://www.example.com/contact could show content in English for one user and French for another user. Unfortunately, this violates a fundamental rule of the Web: that a particular URL returns the same resource regardless of the user. To further muddy the problem, which version of the content would be indexed by search engines?

A better policy is to include the locale in the URL. This is fully-supported by the routing system using the special _locale parameter:

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        # app/config/routing.yml
contact:
    path:     /{_locale}/contact
    defaults: { _controller: AppBundle:Contact:index }
    requirements:
        _locale: en|fr|de
    

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        <!-- app/config/routing.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<routes xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/routing"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/routing
        http://symfony.com/schema/routing/routing-1.0.xsd">

    <route id="contact" path="/{_locale}/contact">
        <default key="_controller">AppBundle:Contact:index</default>
        <requirement key="_locale">en|fr|de</requirement>
    </route>
</routes>
    

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        // app/config/routing.php
use Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCollection;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;

$routes = new RouteCollection();
$routes->add('contact', new Route(
    '/{_locale}/contact',
    array(
        '_controller' => 'AppBundle:Contact:index',
    ),
    array(
        '_locale' => 'en|fr|de',
    )
));

return $routes;
    

When using the special _locale parameter in a route, the matched locale is automatically set on the Request and can be retrieved via the getLocale() method. In other words, if a user visits the URI /fr/contact, the locale fr will automatically be set as the locale for the current request.

You can now use the locale to create routes to other translated pages in your application.

Tip

Read How to Use Service Container Parameters in your Routes to learn how to avoid hardcoding the _locale requirement in all your routes.

Setting a Default Locale

What if the user's locale hasn't been determined? You can guarantee that a locale is set on each user's request by defining a default_locale for the framework:

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        # app/config/config.yml
framework:
    default_locale: en
    

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        <!-- app/config/config.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:framework="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/symfony"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd
        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/symfony
        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/symfony/symfony-1.0.xsd">

    <framework:config default-locale="en" />
</container>
    

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        // app/config/config.php
$container->loadFromExtension('framework', array(
    'default_locale' => 'en',
));
    

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.

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