Crystal Internationalization
The cri18n shard provides an all inclusive library for developing internationalized crystal applications, taking advantage of crystal’s macro language to help streamline development and deployment to provide confidence in the quality of your service.
Now that that boilerplate is out of the way….
Installation
Add to your shards.yml file
dependencies:
cr-i18n:
github: crystal-community/cr-i18n
and run > shards install
Usage
Label Files
Label files can be written as yaml or json files, and all files in the same directory are considered part of the same language / locale. A typical label directory layout could be something like:
labels
├── root.yml
└── en
├── en.yml
└── us
└── us.yml
The root.yml file is intended to be populated by developers and represent the first place where labels exist. Labels are then split into Languages (e.g. en) and Locales (e.g. us), found in the directory name. The names of files in these directories don’t matter, and the directory name is case sensitive (i.e. labels/en/us corresponds to the locale en-us, which is different from lables/en/Us which corresponds to en-Us).
Labels within label files can be organized and named anyway that makes sense. For example, a root.yml could contain:
user_page:
username: Username
un_alias: "%(username): %{name}"
email: Email
given_name: First Name
surname: Last Name
greetings: Hello, %{name}!
Using in Crystal
require "cr-i18n"
CrI18n.compiler_load_labels("./path/to/labels")
And then throughout your application code, use the top level label macro for whenever you have a string that will be displayed to the user:
label(user_page.username) # => "Username"
label(user_page.greeting, name: "Troy") # => "Hello, Troy!"
label(user_page.un_alias, name: "tsornson") # => "Username: tsornson"
From here, check out the development page for more details on how cr-i18n can help you build faster without worrying if you forgot a label somewhere or not.