Detect language preference in Django and confirm it works —25 September 2012
Django has built-in facility for detecting the preferred language of clients, but it is not enabled by default.
First of all, you need to enable the django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware in the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES configuration in settings.py. The ordering of the middleware classes is relevant, in particular LocaleMiddleware must come after SessionMiddleware and before CommonMiddleware. A bit of a “gotcha” there is that in the default settings.py file the CommonMiddleware comes before SessionMiddleware. Make sure their order is correct, and insert LocaleMiddleware somewhere in between, like this:
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',
'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
# other middleware ...
)
As a result, Django will fill in the detected language preference of the client in all request objects as request.LANGUAGE_CODE, in a format like en for English, pt-br for Brazilian Portugese, and so on.
To test that it works, create a primitive view method like this (and wire it to a url handler):
from django.http import HttpResponse
def mylang(request):
return HttpResponse("request.LANGUAGE_CODE = %s\n" % request.LANGUAGE_CODE)
It is easiest to fake a client preference and thereby test the preference is correctly detected using curl or wget:
curl http://localhost:8000/mylang
curl http://localhost:8000/mylang --header 'Accept-Language: de'
curl http://localhost:8000/mylang --header 'Accept-Language: de' --cookie django_language=hu
For more details see the official documentation: