When we're writing software for a global audience, it's nice if we can provide it according to their native languages and conventions. Translating all of the text can be a huge undertaking, but we can start small by making sure that when we show the day and date it appears as the user expects. For example, to me it's Tuesday, April 20, 2021; to my friend Paul in the UK, it's Tuesday, 20 April 2021 (note the difference in order); and to my other friend Gabór in Israel, it's יום שלישי, 20 באפריל 2021 (note the different direction of the text, different language, and character set).
Thankfully, we have a number of tools to assist us:
- The DateTime::Locale library, which enables our Perl software to represent dates and times globally and contains a catalog of locales. It works with the DateTime library for storing our dates as objects that can be easily manipulated and formatted.
- The HTTP Accept-Language header, which lets a web browser communicate to the server what natural languages and locale variants the user understands.
- The HTTP::AcceptLanguage module, which helps us parse the Accept-Language header and select a compatible locale.
Our sample code uses the Mojolicious framework and is very simple; almost half of it is just HTML web page templates. You could easily adapt it to other frameworks or templating systems.