CodeIgniter - Store and read Language from database.

You’ll want to create a language file on the fly (e.g. whenever you update the language contents of your database)

1st: the database layout

Create a table lang_token with columns id, category, description, lang, token and populate its fields like this:

    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `lang_token` (
      `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
      `category` text NOT NULL,
      `description` text NOT NULL,
      `lang` text NOT NULL,
      `token` text NOT NULL,
      PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
    ) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=3 ;

    INSERT INTO `lang_token` (`id`, `category`, `description`, `lang`, `token`) 
    VALUES
      (1, 'list', 'add', 'english', 'add to list'),
      (2, 'list', 'remove', 'english', 'remove from list');

2nd: About CodeIgniter language files

CodeIgniter will look first in your application/language directory, Each language should be stored in its own folder. Make sure you have your English or German, etc. subdirectories created e.g. application/language/english

3rd: Controller function to create language file on the fly

About The Codeigniter language files: It's a good practice to use a common prefix (category) for all messages in a given file to avoid collisions with similarly named items in other files There structure is like: $lang['category_description'] = “token”;

    function updatelangfile($my_lang){
        $this->db2->where('lang',$my_lang);
        $query=$this->db2->get('lang_token');

        $lang=array();
        $langstr="<?php  if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
                /**
                *
                * Created:  2014-05-31 by Vickel
                *
                * Description:  ".$my_lang." language file for general views
                *
                */"."\n\n\n";



        foreach ($query->result() as $row){

            $langstr.= "\$lang['".$row->category."_".$row->description."'] = \"$row->token\";"."\n";
        }
        write_file('./application/language/'.$my_lang.'/general_lang.php', $langstr);

    }

Final notes:

1. Whenever you change your database, you’ll call the function updatelangfile(‘english’)

2. Don’t forget to load the file helper and language class in the constructor of the controller where updatelangfile() is located:

   function __construct(){
       parent::__construct();
       $this->load->helper('file');
       $this->lang->load('general', 'english');
   }