Case sensitivity and LanguageHandler

Developers Ruby API
4

Let me try to get the most important theme across to you about the LanguageHandler class.

The LanguageHandler class is:

  • dumb, ie, it has no “smarts” nor “intelligence”
  • it is a simple “lookup” function
    • it look’s up a key being an English string in a Ruby Hash, and returns the string value for that key.
    • the string value is the local language that YOU manually translated when you created all the various .strings files for your extension.
  • the LanguageHandler class does NOT translate English “on-the-fly” (because most translation engines on the web, forbid their use this way.)
  • the LanguageHandler class uses twice the amount of memory just loading your translated strings into a Ruby hash does.

For these reasons, I do not use the LanguageHandler class at all. I just write Ruby files (that are part of the extension’s files,) that define a language hash (within my extension module) that uses short symbol keys.