annoying Session overwriting

Question

Hello , I'm making a multi language website and i decided to use sessions to remember the current language , overall it works as its supposed to , but there is one bug that i can't fix . 1) i load the page and it displays properly in Bulgaria 2) i add '&lang=en' to test if its working properly , and it does 3) when i remove the '&lang=en' and its back to Bulgarian when its not supposed to its supposed to stay in English

here is what is in the header of the page

   if(isset($_GET['lang'])){
    $lang = htmlspecialchars($_GET['lang']);
lang($lang);
}
if(!isset($_SESSION['slang'])){
    lang('bg');
}else {
    lang($_SESSION['slang']);
}

and here is my function that handles the language switching

function lang($lang=''){

     if($lang=='bg'){
      $_SESSION['slang'] = 'bg' ;
      include_once('./includes/bulgarian.php');
     }
     if ($lang == 'en'){
      $_SESSION['slang'] = 'en' ;
      include_once('./includes/english.php');
     }else {
      $_SESSION['slang'] = 'bg' ;
      include_once('./includes/bulgarian.php');
     }

}

if someone can explain me why this is happening and how i can fix it it would be great Thanks

Answer 1

Browser cache? Can you clear all saved info in the browser and then try?

Answer 2

Judging from what you wrote the code should work you should check if $_SESSION actually gets across pages.

Are you using: session_start(); ?

Answer 3

Make sure you're calling session_start on each page. I tried it on my computer, and got your results without the session_start. When I added it, it worked as desired.

You can try using echo session_id(); to see if the session is started on any page

Answer 4

Please call session_start() to load your session.

Answer 5

I would just use the Gnu's gettext spec if I were you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettext