Can't get gettext (php) on Ubuntu working

Question

The following example works on Mac OS X with Apache, i.e. I get the translated string echoed back. But on Ubuntu with lighttpd I get the original text \'Inactive account\'.

Answer 1

Though I followed the steps outlined in the accepted answer, I couldn't get it to work on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I had to do two important things:

(1) Before generating the messages.mo file, I had to specify in message.po explicitly UTF-8 for charset:

msgid   ""
msgstr  "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
        "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
        "POT-Creation-Date: 2016-12-19 16:28+0530\n"
        "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
        "Last-Translator: FULL NAME \n"
        "Language-Team: LANGUAGE \n"
        "Language: \n"
        "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
        "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"    <---------change here
        "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

(2) I had to maintain same folder name as the locale installed. For instance, I installed Kannada by running sudo locale-gen kn_IN. This generated kn_IN.UTF-8. Note the capital letters and hyphen in UTF-8. I used this same name while setting locale in my php script and for the folder name where I put the messages.mo file:

PHP Script:

// I18N support information
$locale = "kn_IN.UTF-8";       <----------change here
putenv("LANG=".$locale); 
putenv("LC_ALL=".$locale);
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);

$domain = 'messages';
bindtextdomain($domain, "./Locale");
bind_textdomain_codeset($domain, 'UTF-8');
textdomain($domain);

Folder Name:

project_folder
    /Locale
        /kn_IN.UTF-8      <------change here
            /LC_MESSAGES
                /messages.mo

Ubuntu is case sensitive to folder and file names. So make sure the capital letters are maintained as shown above.