views.i18n.set_language()

set_language(request) [source]

As a convenience, Django comes with a view, django.views.i18n.set_language(), that sets a user’s language preference and redirects to a given URL or, by default, back to the previous page.

Activate this view by adding the following line to your URLconf:

url(r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),

(Note that this example makes the view available at /i18n/setlang/.)

The view expects to be called via the POST method, with a language parameter set in request. If session support is enabled, the view saves the language choice in the user’s session. Otherwise, it saves the language choice in a cookie that is by default named django_language. (The name can be changed through the LANGUAGE_COOKIE_NAME setting.)

After setting the language choice, Django looks for a next parameter in the POST or GET data. If that is found and Django considers it to be a safe URL (i.e. it doesn’t point to a different host and uses a safe scheme), a redirect to that URL will be performed. Otherwise, Django may fall back to redirecting the user to the URL from the Referer header or, if it is not set, to /, depending on the nature of the request:

• For AJAX requests, the fallback will be performed only if the next parameter was set. Otherwise a 204 status code (No Content) will be returned.
• For non-AJAX requests, the fallback will always be performed.

Here’s example HTML template code:

{% load i18n %}

<form action="{% url 'set_language' %}" method="post">{% csrf_token %}
    <input name="next" type="hidden" value="{{ redirect_to }}" />
    <select name="language">
        {% get_current_language as LANGUAGE_CODE %}
        {% get_available_languages as LANGUAGES %}
        {% get_language_info_list for LANGUAGES as languages %}
        {% for language in languages %}
            <option value="{{ language.code }}"{% if language.code == LANGUAGE_CODE %} selected="selected"{% endif %}>
                {{ language.name_local }} ({{ language.code }})
            </option>
        {% endfor %}
    </select>
    <input type="submit" value="Go" />
</form>

In this example, Django looks up the URL of the page to which the user will be redirected in the redirect_to context variable.