Documentation

You are viewing the documentation for the 2.3.4 release in the 2.3.x series of releases. The latest stable release series is 3.0.x.

§Messages and internationalization

§Specifying languages supported by your application

A valid language code is specified by a valid ISO 639-2 language code, optionally followed by a valid ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, such as fr or en-US.

To start you need to specify the languages supported by your application in the conf/application.conf file:

application.langs="en,en-US,fr"

§Externalizing messages

You can externalize messages in the conf/messages.xxx files.

The default conf/messages file matches all languages. Additionally you can specify language-specific message files such as conf/messages.fr or conf/messages.en-US.

You can then retrieve messages using the play.api.i18n.Messages object:

val title = Messages("home.title")

All internationalization API calls take an implicit play.api.i18.Lang argument retrieved from the current scope. You can also specify it explicitly:

val title = Messages("home.title")(Lang("fr"))

Note: If you have an implicit Request in the scope, it will provide an implicit Lang value corresponding to the preferred language extracted from the Accept-Language header and matching one of the application supported languages. You should add a Lang implicit parameter to your template like this: @()(implicit lang: Lang).

§Messages format

Messages are formatted using the java.text.MessageFormat library. For example, assuming you have message defined like:

files.summary=The disk {1} contains {0} file(s).

You can then specify parameters as:

Messages("files.summary", d.files.length, d.name)

§Notes on apostrophes

Since Messages uses java.text.MessageFormat, please be aware that single quotes are used as a meta-character for escaping parameter substitutions.

For example, if you have the following messages defined:

info.error=You aren''t logged in!
example.formatting=When using MessageFormat, '''{0}''' is replaced with the first parameter.

you should expect the following results:

Messages("info.error") == "You aren't logged in!"
Messages("example.formatting") == "When using MessageFormat, '{0}' is replaced with the first parameter."

§Retrieving supported language from an HTTP request

You can retrieve the languages supported by a specific HTTP request:

def index = Action { request =>
  Ok("Languages: " + request.acceptLanguages.map(_.code).mkString(", "))
}

Next: The application Global object