I'm using HTML_Template for templating in my C++-based web app (don't ask). I chose that because it was very simple and it turns out to be a good solution.
The only problem right now is that I would like to be able to include translatable strings in the HTML templates (HTML_Template does not really support that).
Ultimately, what I would like is to have a single file that contains all the strings to be translated. It can then be given to a translator and plugged back in to the app and used depending on which language the user chose in settings.
I've been going back and forth on some options and was wondering what others felt was the best choice (or if there's a better choice that isn't listed)
Extend HTML_Template to include a tag for holding the literal string to translate. So, for example, in the HTML I would put something like
<TMPL_TRANS "this is the text to translate"/>
Use a completely separate scheme for translation and preprocess the HTML files to generate the final template files (without the special translation lingo). For example, in the pre-processed file, translatable text would look like this:
{{this is the text to translate}}
and the final would look like:
this is the text to translate
Don't do anything and let the translators find the string to translate in the html and js files themselves.
You may want to consider arrays, if not already.
A popular implementation for translating strings is to use tables and indices. One index is for the language and the second index is for the string. Create a function that returns strings based on these two indices:
const std::string& Get_String(unsigned int language_index, unsigned int string_index);
Each language would have a table of strings (or const char *). There would be a table of pointers to language tables, one for each supported language.
The biggest pain is to convert existing code to use this system.
Hope this helps.
Related
Is it possible to make a graph like this one with ocamlgraph? HTML labels have to be delimited with <> instead of "" and I don't see any mention of this functionality in the documentation.
They can parse this kind of dot nodes: the documentation for the Dot_ast module of OCamlgraph has a Html of string case of the id type for this. It seems like they cannot print this kind of dot files, as the `Label node of the Dot attributes only handles direct strings.
If you need this feature, you could consider implementing it yourself (just change the files graphviz.ml and graphviz.mli), I'm sure the authors would be glad to have some contribution.
I have a website (Coldfusion) on which I want to offer multi language, but no idea what is the best way to do this.
There 2 plans I have:
1:
Of course all content (text) is in a database.
If a user would want a different language, the user would click on a link/flag, this would put the requested language in a session variable, for example: session.language = "es"
In the database I would have 2 columns (every language has 1 column) and then select the text which belongs to 'es'
Every page would then do a request to the database to get the text beloging to the session.language.
PROS: Relatively simple to implement
CONS: SEO wise I don't think this could be very good. http:// www.domain.com/page.cfm would give an english text or spanish text (or other language). Google will not add duplicate URL's
2:
Do something with http:// www.domain.com/en/page.cfm for english and http:// www.domain.com/es/page.cfm for english.
With a URL rewrite rule the language value in the URL http:// www.domain.com/en/page.cfm would actually be a page http:// www.domain.com/page.cfm?language=en
The url.language variable will then select the correct language from the database.
PROS: Unique URL for each language. Good for SEO and Google indexing.
CONS: A bit more difficult to implement. (I think)
Or does anyone have other / better ideas?
Thanks!!
You should always first check the browser header "Accept-Language" for the default language(s) (the correct standard way to do it), and offer links (the intuitively seemingly right way) only as an alternative.
Doing it in a database doesn't seem very standard. Let's assume you would like to use MVC architecture (model-view-controller). Most software uses keys in the presentation layer (view) (eg. html) and along with the presentation layer, you have language files (in Java, this is typically properties files) which are mapped simply by their filenames, and can be modified by regular users, without any special skills, such as professional translators with no computer skills. Certainly you could put it in a database, but then it is just more work, and moves the information out of the presentation layer.
There are various libraries for doing this. You should find the normal one for your application. Please edit your question to include what you are using to develop the application. (eg. JSP, Tapestry, Wicket, ASP, PHP, etc.) So for example, if you wanted to use JSPs, I would then suggest you use the JSTL tag library's language support. Or if you were using Tapestry, I would point you to http://tapestry.apache.org/localization.html or http://tapestry.apache.org/tapestry4.1/UsersGuide/localization.html
To look it up, you can look for the terms "internationalization" aka "i18n", or "localization". (The terms don't mean the same thing, but few use them correctly, so either works. http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-i18n)
I would go for option 2. Every translation should have its own url. Links to your website will already be in the intended translation.
To store translations in a database, I wouldn't put every translation in a seperate column, but rather put them in a seperate table:
Table Posts:
- id
- title_id
- ...
Table Translations:
- label_id
- value
- country_code
- language_code
Where title_id matches label_id
This way you won't have to alter your table structure when a new translation is added. This allows you to have infinite translations for any label or text.
To effectively do a multi-lingual site then you need set a rule for yourself that NO TEXT is ever put in the source as hard coded. It either needs to come from the database and / or a Resource Bundle.
Text from the database
You need to make sure that the column you are storing your data in is unicode otherwise you'll have issues with accented character. Also don't have a column per language as this is not scalable, do what #jan suggests and have a translations table where the items are keyed on a reference as well as a language.
Resource bundles
You are not going to want to get every last little bit of text from the database so for those you can utilise a resource bundle. This is an, admittedly old, link http://www.sustainablegis.com/blog/cfg11n/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=FD48909C-50FC-543B-1FE177C1B97E8CC1 from Paul Hastings's blog about some solutions to resource bundles. To be honest his blog is an excellent resource on this very subject.
With regards to how you handle the URLs do not do option 1 as you quite rightly identified you will cause issues the SEO rankings of the page and it will mean that users cannot correctly share or return to the page.
Two approaches are having the language code in the URL as you identified in option 1.
Pros
Simpler to configure
Cons
You have one application which means that as you add more languages you add more complexity and weight on the memory of that app
Or you can have a different sub domain or domain per application e.g. es.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.es they can all be the same codebase
Pros
Each language is a standalone application meaning it has it's own memory
Cons
more effort to configure
http://i18n.riaforge.org/ has a download for i18n. It can be used to make sure that all string labels match. That way if some one wants to change "Save" to "Update", it can all be done in one spot.
It is also important to consider the technical background of those that will being doing the translation. It is often easier to get the translation team to edit files in notepad as opposed to updating a db. Text files work well with version control.
The best way i found is to use an XML to hold just that pages language stuff, one xml to cover each page, and you then vary it for language. when the page loads, just load a different XML from the database or files... many ways to do this. all other methods i have tried have their issues, and at least this one allows you to take a language XML, hand it to someone who will copy it, and then change the boxes... you put it in the DB to serve it.
one can also do this for text, and have the DB make the XML for just the text for that page by using a list of items to include in the XML for the page.
once you get the idea, the rest becomes very easy...
and given CF ways of accessing such data with dot notation, easy peasy to us
say you have "Load Images"
in english xml it may be <LoadIMGS>Load Images</LoadIMGS>
in chinese it may be <LoadIMGS>加载图像</LoadIMGS>
or <LoadIMGS>Jiā zǎi túxiàng</LoadIMGS>
regardless, in your CFM code you would just put #variablename.LoadIMGS# in the place... i would also suggest putting in the loadimages tag the size the font should be adjusted to if not normal size. that way, when translations are too large, you can shrink that font there for that... etc.
enjoy!!!
HTML entities are not displayed correctly in Textile because the ampersand is converted into & by the system. Is there any way to input e.g. ⌘ and actually get ⌘?
Wrapping the entity in ==⌘== does disable Textile processing for that block. Maybe that's as good as it gets?
I'm using RedCloth.
After having had a look through RedCloth sources, there does not seem to be a way of doing this.
Maybe it's as well, on second thought: Textile is not necessarily meant to output HTML, but HTML entities are entirely an HTML solution. I'll just input funky characters directly.
RedCloth does not get hex values in html entities, but others, like or € are processed properly.
I have been working with Coldfusion 9 lately (background in PHP primarily) and I am scratching my head trying to figure out how to 'clean/sanitize' input / string that is user submitted.
I want to make it HTMLSAFE, eliminate any javascript, or SQL query injection, the usual.
I am hoping I've overlooked some kind of function that already comes with CF9.
Can someone point me in the proper direction?
Well, for SQL injection, you want to use CFQUERYPARAM.
As for sanitizing the input for XSS and the like, you can use the ScriptProtect attribute in CFAPPLICATION, though I've heard that doesn't work flawlessly. You could look at Portcullis or similar 3rd-party CFCs for better script protection if you prefer.
This an addition to Kyle's suggestions not an alternative answer, but the comments panel is a bit rubbish for links.
Take a look a the ColdFusion string functions. You've got HTMLCodeFormat, HTMLEditFormat, JSStringFormat and URLEncodedFormat. All of which can help you with working with content posted from a form.
You can also try to use the regex functions to remove HTML tags, but its never a precise science. This ColdFusion based regex/html question should help there a bit.
You can also try to protect yourself from bots and known spammers using something like cfformprotect, which integrates Project Honeypot and Akismet protection amongst other tools into your forms.
You've got several options:
"Global Script Protection" Administrator setting, which applies a regular expression against post and get (i.e. FORM and URL) variables to strip out <script/>, <img/> and several other tags
Use isValid() to validate variables' data types (see my in depth answer on this one).
<cfqueryparam/>, which serves to create SQL bind parameters and validate the datatype passed to it.
That noted, if you are really trying to sanitize HTML, use Java, which ColdFusion can access natively. In particular use the OWASP AntiSamy Project, which takes an HTML fragment and whitelists what values can be part of it. This is the same approach that sites like SO and slashdot.org use to protect submissions and is a more secure approach to accepting markup content.
Sanitation of strings in coldfusion and in quite any language is very important and depends on what you want to do with the string. most mitigations are for
saving content to database (e.g. <cfqueryparam ...>)
using content to show on next page (e.g. put url-parameter in link or show url-parameter in text)
saving files and using upload filenames and content
There is always a risk if you follow the idea to prevent and reduce a string by allow basically everything in the first step and then sanitize malicious code "away" by deleting or replacing characters (blacklist approach).
The better solution is to replace strings with rereplace(...) agains regular expressions that explicitly allow only the characters needed for the scenario you use it as an easy solution, whenever this is possible. use cases are inputs for numbers, lists, email-addresses, urls, names, zip, cities, etc.
For example if you want to ask for a email-address, you could use
<cfif reFindNoCase("^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+#[A-Z0-9.-]+\.(?:[A-Z]{5})$", stringtosanitize)>...ok, clean...<cfelse>...not ok...</cfif>
(or an own regex).
For HTML-Imput or CSS-Imput I would also recommend OWASP Java HTML Sanitizer Project.
I use Owasp Anti samy with Ebay policy file to prevent XSS attacks on my website.
I also use Hibernate search to index my objects.
When I use this code:
String html = "special word: été";
// use the Ebay configuration file
Policy policy = Policy.getInstance(xssPolicyFile.getInputStream());
AntiSamy as = new AntiSamy();
CleanResults cr = as.scan(html, policy);
// result is now : "special word: été"
result = cr.getCleanHTML();
As you can see all chars "é" has been transformed to their html entity equivalent "é"
My page is on UTF-8, so I don't need this transformation. Moreover, when I index this text with Hibernate Search, it indexes the word with html entities, so I can't find word "été" on my index.
How can I force antisamy to not transform special chars to their html entity equivalent ?
thanks
PS: an issue has been opened : http://code.google.com/p/owaspantisamy/issues/detail?id=99
I ran into the same problem this morning.
I have encapsulated antisamy in a class and I use apache StringEscapeUtil from apache common-lang to restore special characters.
CleanResults cleanResults = antiSamy.scan(taintedHtml);
cleanedHtml = cleanResults.getCleanHTML();
return StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml(cleanedHtml)
The result is a cleaned up HTML without the HTML escaping of special characters.
Hope this helps.
Like Mohamad said it in a comment, Antisamy has just released a new directive named : entityEncodeIntlChars
here is the detail : http://code.google.com/p/owaspantisamy/source/detail?r=240
It seems that this directive solves the problem.
After scouring the AntiSamy source code, I found no way of changing this behavior apart from modifying AntiSamy.
Check out this one: http://code.google.com/p/owaspantisamy/source/browse/#svn/trunk/dotNet/current/source/owaspantisamy/html/scan
Grab the source and notice that key classes (AntiSamyDOMScanner, CleanResults) use standard framework objects (like XmlDocument). Compile and run with the binary you compiled - so that you can see everything in a debugger - as in which of the major classes actually corrupts your data. With that in hand you'll be able to either change a few properties on major objects to make it stop or inject your own post-processing to revert the wrongdoing (say with a regexp). Latter you can expose that as additional top-level property, say one named NoMess :-)
Chances are that behavior in that respect is different between languages (there's 3 in that trunk) but the same tactics will work no matter which one you have to deal with.