Building a multi-language navigation menu in CodeI

I'm trying to create a function that builds and displays a navigation menu, whilst keeping to MVC as much as possible (though I'm new to it, so I don't understand it completely).

My script dies without providing an error message. Let's investigate!

In my view, I call a function that builds the menu's contents, and send in the names of the pages that should exist in the menu:

// application/views/templates/header.php

<ul class="navigation">
        <?php 
        //  Send in the English name, which also becomes the slug.
        //  Function should return the name in the appropriate language,
        //  plus the slug in English.

        $args = ['home','compete','gallery','finalists','about'];
        build_navigation($args);
        ?>
</ul>

The idea now is to loop through those arguments, and build a list-item for each argument containing the file name — which is also the URL slug — and the display name in the appropriate language.

// application/helpers/navigation_helper.php
// This is loaded in autoload.php — confirmed working

<?php
if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

if ( ! function_exists('build_navigation')) {

    function build_navigation($args) {
        foreach ($args as $token)
            echo "<li><a href=\"{$token}\">{$this->lang->line($token)}</a></li>\n";
    }   
}

?>

When I look at that, it sort of makes sense in my head, but at the same time raises questions like “what is $this in the given context?”

If I change $this->lang->line($token) to just $token, the script runs (though I don't get my multi-language functionality).

I have the language files I need…

// application/language/english/en_lang.php

<?php

$lang['home'] = "Home";
$lang['compete'] = "Compete";
$lang['gallery'] = "Gallery";
$lang['finalists'] = "Finalists";
$lang['about'] = "About";

?>

// application/language/swedish/sv_lang.php

<?php

$lang['home'] = "Hem";
$lang['compete'] = "Tävla";
$lang['gallery'] = "Galleri";
$lang['finalists'] = "Finalister";
$lang['about'] = "Info";

?>

…And here you can see that I'm loading my language files in my controller (which almost exactly mirrors the pages controller in the CI docs):

<?php

/**
 * Pages
 *
 * Class for building static pages.
 *
 */

class Pages extends CI_Controller {
    public function view ($page = 'home') {

        if (!file_exists('application/views/pages/'.$page.'.php'))
            show_404();

        $data['title'] = ucfirst($page); // Capitalise first letter of title

        $this->lang->load('en','english');
        $this->lang->load('sv','swedish');
        $this->load->view('templates/header', $data);
        $this->load->view('pages/'.$page, $data);
        $this->load->view('templates/footer', $data);

    }
}

?>

In your build_navigation($args)

try

$ci = &get_instance();

and instead of $this-> use $ci->lang

Als0,

$this->lang->load('filename', 'language');

Where filename is the name of the file you wish to load (without the file extension), and language is the language set containing it (ie, english). If the second parameter is missing, the default language set in your application/config/config.php file will be used.

You only need to load the required language not both of them.