Multilanguage URLs in Django

Question

What is the best way to support multilanguage URLs in Django? Like:

http://myenglishwebsite.com/user/foo
http://mygermanwebsite.com/benutzer/foo

Should I use multilang in urls.py like:

(r'^%s/(?P<slug>[-w]+)/$' % _('user'), 'myapp.view.relatedaction')

It doesn't seem like a good solution and I couldn't make it work :))

Answer 1

The best way is to just use the same urls for every language. They are not there for the enduser to read anyway.

Have you thought about what will happen when your url cannot be represented by ASCII?

Answer 2

This solution doesn't work because urls.py file is loading once in Django server before first user actually can make any request, so it must be user-independent file (any module level code should be user-independent, because it is loading only once).

My guess is that Django url resolver makes str() casting somewhere in the middle of the request, so you can use some decorator class:

(URLLangDecorator(r'^%s/(?P<slug>[-w]+)/$', ['user']), 'myapp.view.relatedaction')
class URLLangDecorator:
    def __init__(self, url, params):
        self.url, self.params = url, params

    def __str__(self):
        return self.url % map(_, self.params)
    # Django can also preform "%" operation, so to be safe:
    def __mod__(self, arg):
        return str(self) % arg

This is guess, so I'm not sure if it will work.