Setting Language manually in Django 1.4

I spent today debugging a multilingual django app that I didn’t write. The problem is that the site’s language was being changed when you used the language switcher, but not if you typed in the url. So http://example.com/fr would only occasionally land you on the French version of the site. When you’re using custom language codes for any reason (in our case, we were matching the client’s lang codes) you’re going to have to set the app’s language.

The relevant code:

    def manual_language_function(request, lang):

        if hasattr(request, 'session'):
            request.session['django_language'] = lang
        else:
            # do something else

Because setting the session isn’t enough, you’ve got to add:

        translation.activate(lang)

And the whole thing for completeness’s sake

def manual_language_function(request, lang):

    if hasattr(request, 'session'):
        request.session['django_language'] = lang
        translation.activate(lang)
    else:
        # do something else

I lost a few hours figuring this out today, so here you go.