react-i18next VS i18next-http-backend

> It’s important to be aware of what you are getting if you go with React, and what you are getting is a far cry from what a framework would offer, with all the corresponding pros and cons.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

In my experience, with something as great, size/ecosystem-wise as React, there will almost always be at least one "mainstream" package for whatever you might want to do with it, that integrates pretty well. Where a lot of things might come out of the box with a framework, with a library I often find myself just needing to install the "right" package, and from there it's pretty much the same.

For example, using https://angular.io/guide/i18n-overview or installing and using https://react.i18next.com/

Or something like https://angular.io/guide/form-validation out of the box, vs installing and using https://formik.org/

Or perhaps https://angular.io/guide/router vs https://reactrouter.com/en/main

Even adding something that's not there out of the box is pretty much the same, like https://primeng.org/ or https://primereact.org/

React will typically have more fragmentation and therefore also choice, but I don't see those two experiences as that different. Updates and version management/supply chain will inevitably be more of a mess with the library, admittedly.

Now, projects like Next https://nextjs.org/ exist and add what some might regard as the missing pieces and work well if you want something opinionated and with lots of features out of the box, but a lot of those features (like SSR) are actually pretty advanced and not always even necessary.

In a recent project I've been using react-i18next so I'll use its syntax for the examples, but pretty much every library works similarly.

react-i18next

i18next - You can find documentation and resources for using i18next at react.i18next.com. i18next is a popular internationalization framework for JavaScript, including React. It provides a comprehensive solution for handling translations, formatting, and more.

So far, we’ve been using a utility createLocalizedString to create and use the LocalizedString type. This utility is only really practical in unit tests. For real applications, we’ll want to use a translation function from react-i18next or next-i18next to do the heavy lifting. Then we just wrap the translation functions that are provided in order to use our type:

Website: https://react.i18next.com/

If you are talking about handling translations for your application, take a look at https://react.i18next.com/

I will be supporting Korean as a part of the beta. I have to look deeper into https://react.i18next.com/ in order to understand what it provides. My goal is for engineers to be able to click a single button and have localizations always up to date in their codebase, not delaying shipping a new version or having to even think about it.

With the new react-i18next version, when loading multiple namespaces, t function will infer and accept the keys for the first namespace. So this pattern is now accepted:

react-i18next

A React.js based i18next setup with in-memory translation resources could also look very similar to the above example, so let's raise the bar a little bit and see what a setup with lazy loading translations like with i18next-http-backend looks like:

The next package will load the values depending on the language returned by the language detector.

import i18next from 'i18next' import I18NextVue from 'i18next-vue' import LanguageDetector from 'i18next-browser-languagedetector' import Backend from 'i18next-http-backend' export const i18nextPromise = i18next // i18next-http-backend // loads translations from your server // https://github.com/i18next/i18next-http-backend .use(Backend) // detect user language // learn more: https://github.com/i18next/i18next-browser-languageDetector .use(LanguageDetector) // init i18next // for all options read: https://www.i18next.com/overview/configuration-options .init({ debug: true, fallbackLng: 'en' }); export default function (app) { app.use(I18NextVue, { i18next }) return app }

// ... $(function () { // use plugins and options as needed, for options, detail see // https://www.i18next.com i18next // i18next-http-backend // loads translations from your server // https://github.com/i18next/i18next-http-backend .use(i18nextHttpBackend) // detect user language // learn more: https://github.com/i18next/i18next-browser-languageDetector .use(i18nextBrowserLanguageDetector) // init i18next // for all options read: https://www.i18next.com/overview/configuration-options .init({ debug: true, fallbackLng: 'en' }, (err, t) => { if (err) return console.error(err); // ... }); });

In addition, we need to install i18next-http-backend which allows us to fetch translations from a directory, and i18next-browser-languagedetector which allows us to detect the user's language:

import i18n from 'i18next'; import { initReactI18next } from 'react-i18next'; import LanguageDetector from 'i18next-browser-languagedetector'; import Backend from 'i18next-http-backend'; import { DateTime } from 'luxon'; i18n // i18next-http-backend // loads translations from your server // https://github.com/i18next/i18next-http-backend .use(Backend) // detect user language // learn more: https://github.com/i18next/i18next-browser-languageDetector .use(LanguageDetector) // pass the i18n instance to react-i18next. .use(initReactI18next) // init i18next // for all options read: https://www.i18next.com/overview/configuration-options .init({ debug: true, fallbackLng: 'en', interpolation: { escapeValue: false, // not needed for react as it escapes by default format: (value, format, lng) => { if (value instanceof Date) { return DateTime.fromJSDate(value).setLocale(lng).toLocaleString(DateTime[format]) } return value; } }, resources: { en: { translation: { description: { part1: 'Edit <1>src/App.js and save to reload.', part2: 'Learn React' }, counter: 'Changed language just once', counter_plural: 'Changed language already {{count}} times', footer: { date: 'Today is {{date, DATE_HUGE}}', date_morning: 'Good morning! Today is {{date, DATE_HUGE}} | Have a nice day!', date_afternoon: 'Good afternoon! It\'s {{date, DATE_HUGE}}', date_evening: 'Good evening! Today was the {{date, DATE_HUGE}}' } } }, de: { translation: { description: { part1: 'Ändere <1>src/App.js und speichere um neu zu laden.', part2: 'Lerne React' }, counter: 'Die Sprache wurde erst ein mal gewechselt', counter_plural: 'Die Sprache wurde {{count}} mal gewechselt', footer: { date: 'Heute ist {{date, DATE_HUGE}}', date_morning: 'Guten Morgen! Heute ist {{date, DATE_HUGE}} | Wünsche einen schönen Tag!', date_afternoon: 'Guten Tag! Es ist {{date, DATE_HUGE}}', date_evening: 'Guten Abend! Heute war {{date, DATE_HUGE}}' } } } } }); export default i18n;