§Externalising messages and internationalization

§Specifying languages supported by your application

The specify your application’s languages, you need a valid language code, specified by a valid ISO Language Code, optionally followed by a valid ISO Country Code. For example, fr or en-US.

To start, you need to specify the languages that your application supports in its 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. You can specify additional language messages files, such as conf/messages.fr or conf/messages.en-US.

You can retrieve messages for the current language using the play.api.i18n.Messages object:

String title = Messages.get("home.title")

You can also specify the language explicitly:

String title = Messages.get(new Lang("fr"), "home.title")

Note: If you have a Request in the scope, it will provide a default Lang value corresponding to the preferred language extracted from the Accept-Language header and matching one the application’s supported languages.

§Formatting messages

Messages can be formatted using the java.text.MessageFormat library. For example, if you have defined a message like this:

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

You can then specify parameters as:

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

§Retrieving supported languages from an HTTP request

You can retrieve a specific HTTP request’s supported languages:

public static Result index() {
  return ok(request().acceptLanguages());
}

Next: The application Global object