If your Laravel app uses multiple locales, it can get tedious keeping track of translations that are yet to be added to the appropriate translation files, e.g English translations in resources/lang/en/validation.php and French translations in resources/lang/fr/validation.php.
To automatically make these checks so I know when a translation is missing, I add unit tests.
It’s been tricky however given I started out by trying to use the trans() and __() helpers to retrieve translation strings as below.
<?php
// Using __() helper
$englishText = __('validation.is_tall', [], 'en');
$frenchText = __('validation.is_tall', [], 'fr');
// Using trans() helper
$englishText = trans('validation.is_tall', [], 'en');
$frenchText = __('validation.is_tall', [], 'fr');
The issue with using these helpers is that they’re written to automatically fallback to a default translation if the requested translation is not found, and further, return the translation key if a default translation is not found.
Notice we’re using a custom validation rule, is_tall, for which translation strings are to be added as follows.
In resources/lang/en/validation.php file:
<?php
return [
// ...
'is_tall' => 'You must be tall',
// ...
];
And in resources/lang/fr/validation.php file:
<?php
return [
// ...
'is_tall' => 'Tu dois être grand',
// ...
];
I later came across this Laracasts answer by Bobby Bouwmann in which he mentions he made a pull request to the Laravel repository to address the above problem, and it was merged. He added the method hasLocaleFor().
<?php
/**
* Determine if a translation exists for a given locale.
*
* @param string $key
* @param string $locale
* @return bool
*/
public function hasForLocale($key, $locale = null)
{
return $this->has($key, $locale, false);
}
Which does exactly what we want, check if a translation exists for a given locale. We can now go ahead and write the unit tests as below.
<?php
namespace Tests\Unit;
use Tests\TestCase;
class IsTallRuleTest extends TestCase
{
/** @test */
public function it_has_an_english_validation_message()
{
$this->assertTrue(
\Lang::hasForLocale('validation.is_tall', 'en'),
'English validation message not found'
);
}
/** @test */
public function it_has_a_french_validation_message()
{
$this->assertTrue(
\Lang::hasForLocale('validation.is_tall', 'fr'),
'French validation message not found'
);
}
}