Obtain a list of available translations

Question

In answering this question: Change language by clicking a button. It was necessary to obtain a list of languages for which translations were available (i.e. their po/mo files were present in wp-content/languages).

So how can you obtain that list?

Clearly by 'available' we can only mean that their po/mo files are present - and it's not a concern if every plug-in also provides a translation for that language (interesting to see how you might do this though).

The list was originally intended for us in a drop-down, whereby a user could select from a list of (available) languages. So the human readable form of the language as well would be a bonus. But I think this is probably not possible.

View the question linked to above for demonstration of the current method used.

Answer 1

You can get a list of available languages with get_available_languages( $dir ). It returns an array with all .mo files where the names does not start with 'continents-cities', 'ms-' or admin-.

To get a readable name for the file use format_code_lang( $code ).

If you scan a directory for language files and get an array like array( 'de_DE', 'tr_TR' ) this function will build translated names for the languages: German and Turkish.