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PHPÊÖ²á

setlocale

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

setlocaleSet locale information

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string setlocale ( int $category , string $locale [, string $... ] )
string setlocale ( int $category , array $locale )

Sets locale information.

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category

category is a named constant specifying the category of the functions affected by the locale setting:

  • LC_ALL for all of the below
  • LC_COLLATE for string comparison, see strcoll()
  • LC_CTYPE for character classification and conversion, for example strtoupper()
  • LC_MONETARY for localeconv()
  • LC_NUMERIC for decimal separator (See also localeconv())
  • LC_TIME for date and time formatting with strftime()
  • LC_MESSAGES for system responses (available if PHP was compiled with libintl)

locale

If locale is NULL or the empty string "", the locale names will be set from the values of environment variables with the same names as the above categories, or from "LANG".

If locale is "0", the locale setting is not affected, only the current setting is returned.

If locale is an array or followed by additional parameters then each array element or parameter is tried to be set as new locale until success. This is useful if a locale is known under different names on different systems or for providing a fallback for a possibly not available locale.

...

(Optional string or array parameters to try as locale settings until success.)

Note:

On Windows, setlocale(LC_ALL, '') sets the locale names from the system's regional/language settings (accessible via Control Panel).

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Returns the new current locale, or FALSE if the locale functionality is not implemented on your platform, the specified locale does not exist or the category name is invalid.

An invalid category name also causes a warning message. Category/locale names can be found in » RFC 1766 and » ISO 639. Different systems have different naming schemes for locales.

Note:

The return value of setlocale() depends on the system that PHP is running. It returns exactly what the system setlocale function returns.

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5.3.0 This function now throws an E_DEPRECATED notice if a string is passed to the category parameter instead of one of the LC_* constants.
4.3.0 Passing multiple locales became possible.
4.2.0 Passing category as a string is now deprecated, use the above constants instead. Passing them as a string (within quotes) will result in a warning message.

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Example #1 setlocale() Examples

<?php
/* Set locale to Dutch */
setlocale(LC_ALL'nl_NL');

/* Output: vrijdag 22 december 1978 */
echo strftime("%A %e %B %Y"mktime(00012221978));

/* try different possible locale names for german as of PHP 4.3.0 */
$loc_de setlocale(LC_ALL'de_DE@euro''de_DE''de''ge');
echo 
"Preferred locale for german on this system is '$loc_de'";
?>

Example #2 setlocale() Examples for Windows

<?php
/* Set locale to Dutch */
setlocale(LC_ALL'nld_nld');

/* Output: vrijdag 22 december 1978 */
echo strftime("%A %d %B %Y"mktime(00012221978));

/* try different possible locale names for german as of PHP 4.3.0 */
$loc_de setlocale(LC_ALL'de_DE@euro''de_DE''deu_deu');
echo 
"Preferred locale for german on this system is '$loc_de'";
?>

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Warning

The locale information is maintained per process, not per thread. If you are running PHP on a multithreaded server API like IIS or Apache on Windows, you may experience sudden changes in locale settings while a script is running, though the script itself never called setlocale(). This happens due to other scripts running in different threads of the same process at the same time, changing the process-wide locale using setlocale().

Tip

Windows users will find useful information about locale strings at Microsoft's MSDN website. Supported language strings can be found at » http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/_crt_language_strings.asp and supported country/region strings at » http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/_crt_country_strings.asp.


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PHPÊÖ²á
PHPÊÖ²á - N: Set locale information

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russ at eatmymonkeydust dot com (08-Dec-2011 11:45)

If you are looking for a getlocale() function simply pass 0 (zero) as the second parameter to setlocale().

Beware though if you use the category LC_ALL and some of the locales differ as a string containing all the locales is returned:

<?php
echo setlocale(LC_ALL, 0);

// LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=C;LC_COLLATE=C;LC_MONETARY=C;LC_MESSAGES=C;LC_PAPER=C;LC_NAME=C;
// LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=C;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

echo setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 0);

// en_US.UTF-8

setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8");
echo
setlocale(LC_ALL, 0);

// en_US.UTF-8

?>

If you are looking to store and reset the locales you could do something like this:

<?php

$originalLocales
= explode(";", setlocale(LC_ALL, 0));
setlocale(LC_ALL, "nb_NO.utf8");

// Do something

foreach ($originalLocales as $localeSetting) {
  if (
strpos($localeSetting, "=") !== false) {
    list (
$category, $locale) = explode("=", $localeSetting);
  }
  else {
   
$category = LC_ALL;
   
$locale   = $localeSetting;
  }
 
setlocale($category, $locale);
}

?>

The above works here (Ubuntu Linux) but as the setlocale() function is just wrapping the equivalent system calls, your mileage may vary on the result.

ts at websafe dot pl (09-Oct-2011 01:54)

If Your linux box returns false on setlocale (so setlocale is not working as expected):

var_dump(setlocale(LC_TIME, 'fr_FR.UTF8', 'fr.UTF8', 'fr_FR.UTF-8', 'fr.UTF-8'));

make sure the glibc package is installed :-)

phcorp (26-Jul-2011 02:16)

To find the locale of a Unix system:
<?php system('locale -a') ?>

flavioacvalverde at gmail dot com (15-Jun-2011 05:28)

For Portugal I had to use

<?php setlocale(LC_ALL, 'Portuguese_Portugal.1252'); ?>

using php with IIS on Windows server.

tomas dot hampl at gmail dot com (23-Apr-2011 09:35)

On Linux, setlocale() depends on the installed locales. To see which locales are available to PHP, run this from the terminal:

"locale -a"

Provided list are all locales that are available on your server for PHP to use. To add a new one, run

locale-gen <locale name> (this may need sudo / root permissions), for example to add a Czech locale, run something like this:

"sudo locale-gen cs_CZ.utf8"

Then you can use this locale declaration:

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'cs_CZ.utf8');

leif at neland dot dk (16-Aug-2010 12:38)

Regarding dash'es in locale, it appears they should be omitted entirely.

In /etc/locale.gen I have

da_DK.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15

but locale -a gives

da_DK.iso885915

which is the format setlocale()  wants.

(Debian)

garygendron at yahoo dot com (29-Jun-2010 04:04)

For a php Mysql query, you could also use, for french canadian, in this example :

$query = 'SET lc_time_names = "fr_CA"';
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed");

$query = 'SELECT @@lc_time_names';
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed");

$query = 'SELECT id, created, YEAR(created) as year, MONTH(created) as month,' .
' CONCAT_WS(" ", MONTHNAME(created), YEAR(created)) as archive' .           
' FROM #__TABLE as e' .
' GROUP BY archive' .
' ORDER BY id DESC';

Your data will be displayed in any locale setting you want. You may even $_GET[lc_time_name] from your multilanguage website.

Omer Sabic (21-Mar-2010 03:27)

On Linux/Apache, when you install and try to use a new locale, the setlocale() function with the new locale will fail sometimes, but not always. To furthermore complicate, setlocale() will always complete with any of the previously installed locales. This would seem a really weird behaviour, which you can fix by restarting Apache, as Kari Sderholm aka Haprog mentioned, but I felt it needed to be properly pointed out.

Kari Sderholm aka Haprog (16-May-2009 12:28)

It took me a while to figure out how to get a Finnish locale correctly set on Ubuntu Server with Apache2 and PHP5.

At first the output for "locale -a" was this:
C
en_US.utf8
POSIX

I had to install a finnish language pack with
"sudo apt-get install language-pack-fi-base"

Now the output for "locale -a" is:
C
en_US.utf8
fi_FI.utf8
POSIX

The last thing you need to do after installing the correct language pack is restart Apache with "sudo apache2ctl restart". The locale "fi_FI.utf8" can then be used in PHP5 after restarting Apache.

For setting Finnish timezone and locale in PHP use:
<?php
date_default_timezone_set
('Europe/Helsinki');
setlocale(LC_ALL, array('fi_FI.UTF-8','fi_FI@euro','fi_FI','finnish'));
?>

wisborg (27-Apr-2009 01:06)

It is correct as stated below that it is common that the UTF-8 should be used without the dash. However on some systems (e.g. MacOS 10.4) the dash is essential.

brice/axice/be (20-Feb-2009 01:19)

Pay attention to the syntax.
- UTF8 without dash ('-')
- locale.codeset and not locale-codeset.

Stupid newbie error but worth knowing them when starting with gettext.

<?php
$codeset
= "UTF8"// warning ! not UTF-8 with dash '-'
       
// for windows compatibility (e.g. xampp) : theses 3 lines are useless for linux systems

putenv('LANG='.$lang.'.'.$codeset);
putenv('LANGUAGE='.$lang.'.'.$codeset);
bind_textdomain_codeset('mydomain', $codeset);

// set locale
bindtextdomain('mydomain', ABSPATH.'/locale/');
setlocale(LC_ALL, $lang.'.'.$codeset);
textdomain('mydomain');
?>

where directory structure of locale is (for example) :
locale/fr_FR/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.mo
locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.mo

and ABSPATH is the absolute path to the locale dir

further note, under linux systems, it seems to be necessary to create the locale at os level using 'locale-gen'.

bardouty at gmail dot com (06-Jan-2009 11:44)

For Apache on Windows (wamp), or Linux RedHat (lampp):
if you expect the locale from the environment of PHP process instead of defining it by your code, you shall request the value of locale with setlocale and a null value.
On windows it is defined in system, not as an env variable, so you cannot see it with getenv(), but the behavior is the same : print with a decimal number with "," if requesting the locale, with "." otherwise.

This is different from the red warning above about locale set by another thread.
It seems that unless you request the setlocale, the locale conv array is not set with the environment. As a result the formatting of numbers is not following the locale in environment.

<?php
print getenv("LANG");
print
$_ENV['LANG'];
print
"calling localeconv() directly\n";
print_r(localeconv());
printf("%f",-123.456);
print
"\ncalling setlocale() before localeconv()\n";
print(
setlocale(LC_ALL,null));
print_r(localeconv());
printf("%f",-123.456);
?>
calling localeconv() directly
Array
(
    [decimal_point] => .
    [thousands_sep] =>
    [int_curr_symbol] =>
    [currency_symbol] =>
    [mon_decimal_point] =>
    [mon_thousands_sep] =>
    [positive_sign] =>
    [negative_sign] =>
    [int_frac_digits] => 127
    [frac_digits] => 127
    [p_cs_precedes] => 127
    [p_sep_by_space] => 127
    [n_cs_precedes] => 127
    [n_sep_by_space] => 127
    [p_sign_posn] => 127
    [n_sign_posn] => 127
    [grouping] => Array
        (
        )

    [mon_grouping] => Array
        (
        )

)
-123.456000
calling setlocale() before localeconv()
French_France.1252
Array
(
    [decimal_point] => ,
    [thousands_sep] => 
    [int_curr_symbol] => EUR
    [currency_symbol] => €
    [mon_decimal_point] => ,
    [mon_thousands_sep] => 
    [positive_sign] =>
    [negative_sign] => -
    [int_frac_digits] => 2
    [frac_digits] => 2
    [p_cs_precedes] => 0
    [p_sep_by_space] => 1
    [n_cs_precedes] => 0
    [n_sep_by_space] => 1
    [p_sign_posn] => 1
    [n_sign_posn] => 1
    [grouping] => Array
        (
            [0] => 3
        )

    [mon_grouping] => Array
        (
            [0] => 3
        )

)
-123,456000

Un_passant (16-Nov-2008 11:56)

For debian/ubuntu, don't forget the charset UFT8.

// Works on Ubuntu 8.04 Server
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'fr_FR.UTF8', 'fr.UTF8', 'fr_FR.UTF-8', 'fr.UTF-8');

benny at bennyborn dot de (09-Oct-2008 12:24)

I had the problem (Debian), that the language de_DE was installed, but setlocale always returned false. I installed the language AFTER compiling PHP - that was the point. If you add some languages afterwards, you have to recompile php ;)

Charlo Dante (07-Oct-2008 10:23)

Edwin Martin wrote already a note for Debian users, but it didn't work for me.

What DID work was this:

apt-get install locales-all

which installs more than the same apt-get without the '-all'

With 'locales-all' I got all languages running well.

Leigh Morresi (02-Oct-2008 07:27)

Setting locale that is not supported by your system will result in some string operations returning a question mark "?" in your strings where it needs to perform transliteration.

1) Always check the return of setlocale() to ensure it has set to something supported

2) on Linux you can use the "locale -a" command to find a list of supported locales

alvaro at demogracia dot com (22-Sep-2008 05:33)

A generalization for mk (26-Jan-2004) and totu (09-Sep-2002). The issue is not restricted to MySQL. For instance, when PHP needs to cast a floating point variable to string, it obeys the LC_NUMERIC settings:

<?php

$foo
= 29.95;

echo
"Locale: " . setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, 0) . "\n";
echo
"Foo: $foo\n";

setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, 'Spanish_Spain.28605');
echo
"Locale: " . setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, 0) . "\n";
echo
"Foo: $foo\n";

?>

Under Windows, this code prints:

Locale: C
Foo: 29.95
Locale: Spanish_Spain.28605
Foo: 29,95

buana95 at yahoo dot com (21-Aug-2008 06:30)

This will works for Indonesian on all platform (Windows, Linux and others Nix server):

<?php
echo '<pre>' . "\n";

//Add english as default (if all Indonesian not available)

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'id_ID.UTF8', 'id_ID.UTF-8', 'id_ID.8859-1', 'id_ID', 'IND.UTF8', 'IND.UTF-8', 'IND.8859-1', 'IND', 'Indonesian.UTF8', 'Indonesian.UTF-8', 'Indonesian.8859-1', 'Indonesian', 'Indonesia', 'id', 'ID', 'en_US.UTF8', 'en_US.UTF-8', 'en_US.8859-1', 'en_US', 'American', 'ENG', 'English');

//will output something like: Minggu, 17 Agustus 2008
echo strftime("%A, %d %B %Y") . "\n";

echo
'</pre>' . "\n";
?>

Arjon (28-Jul-2008 05:12)

Please take heed and read the warning above if you are running on a XAMPP or any other Windows apache server! It just took me far too long to figure this out; and all the while there was a warning right on the page.

If you're experiencing shifting locale settings (check with setlocale(LC_ALL,0), returning the current locale stuff) and you're running a windows server, then it's not just you! Again, I urge everyone to read the red, but oh so easy not to read, warning message on this page.

michal dot kocarek at brainbox dot cz (27-Jul-2008 04:33)

Note about using UTF-8 locale charset on Windows systems:

According to MSDN, Windows setlocale()'s implementation does not support UTF-8 encoding.

Citation from "MSDN setlocale, _wsetlocale" page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x99tb11d.aspx):
The set of available languages, country/region codes, and code pages includes all those supported by the Win32 NLS API except code pages that require more than two bytes per character, such as UTF-7 and UTF-8. If you provide a code page like UTF-7 or UTF-8, setlocale will fail, returning NULL.

So basically, code like
<?php setlocale(LC_ALL, 'Czech_Czech Republic.65001'); // 65001 is UTF-8 codepage ?>
does not work on Windows at all.

(written in time of PHP 5.2.4)

de ronino at kde (reverse it) (25-Jun-2008 10:43)

I experienced the behavior stated in the above Warning box: Running PHP5 on a multithreaded Apache made the current locale change sometimes all of a sudden within a script, so strftime() output wasn't in the required format.

I recompiled Apache with the prefork MPM and now it works like a charm. Took me a long time to find out the reason as I overlooked the warning box searching for either a bug report or a programming error of mine...

jonas at jonashaag dot de (27-May-2008 08:11)

On Ubuntu, you have to take p.e. "de_DE.utf8", all available languages you can get with:
    locale -a

Georg (04-Apr-2008 09:31)

To set locale to 'de_DE' on my Debian 4 machine I had to:
- uncomment 'de_DE' in file /etc/locale.gen and afterwards
- run locale-gen from the shell

bryn AT lunarvis DOT com (21-Jan-2008 01:04)

Posting this in the hope it might be useful to others, as I could find very little info anywhere. If you want to use a Welsh locale and have the suitable language support installed, you pass 'cym' (abbreviated form of Cymraeg) to setlocale:

<?php
setlocale
(LC_TIME, 'cym');
$welsh= gmstrftime("%A, %B %Y - %H:%M",time());
echo
$welsh;
?>

The above certainly applies to Windows systems, but should also apply to Unix if the required support is installed.

Cheers,

Bryn.

ostapk (27-Dec-2007 10:39)

There is a new PECL extension under development called intl (it will be available in PHP5.3). Meanwhile all who rely on the setlocale() and friends should be aware about the limitations of them as covered in this post on the onPHP5.com blog: http://www.onphp5.com/article/22

Periklis (13-Sep-2007 10:33)

In *some* Windows systems, setting LC_TIME only will not work, you must either set LC_ALL or both LC_CTYPE and LC_TIME. BUT if you have already set LC_TIME using setlocale earlier in the script, dates will not be affected! For example:
<?php
setlocale
(LC_TIME, 'greek');
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'greek');
?>
will not work, while
<?php
setlocale
(LC_CTYPE, 'greek');
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'greek');
?>
will do the job.

mvanbaak (09-May-2007 01:03)

To complement Sven K's tip about debian:

You can also install the package locales-all
That one holds all the locales there are in compiled form.

szepeshazi at gmail dot com (19-Feb-2007 03:11)

For those of you who are unfortunate enough (like me) to work in Windows environment, and try to set the locale to a language _and_ to UTF-8 charset, and were unable to do it, here is a workaround.

For example to output the date in hungarian with UTF-8 charset, this will work:

    $dateString = "%B %d., %A";
    setlocale(LC_ALL,'hungarian');
    $res=strftime($dateString);
    echo(iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8', $res));

If anybody knows how to set the locale on Windows to the equivalent of "hu_HU.UTF-8" on unix, please do tell me.

lifeless (20-Nov-2006 05:40)

if your server is an ubuntu (debian like)
you need to install the locales you want (default is english and your language) go to aptitude and install -language-pack-*-base it will resolve dependencies and will try to install a suggested package, remove it if you don't care and proceed.

Clayton Smith (26-Sep-2006 07:15)

If you already have all the locales installed and "locale -a" is only showing a few languages, then edit /etc/locale.gen and add a line, e.g., es_MX ISO-8859-1.  After you add the line, run the command locale-gen for it to generate the locales based on those settings.

Sven K (07-Jun-2006 11:08)

If your system doesn't show any installed locales by "locale -a", try installing them by "dpkg-reconfigure locales" (on debian).

(08-Mar-2006 08:17)

The example from bruno dot cenou at revues dot org below shows the possibility, but I want to spell it out: you can add charset info to setlocale.

Example:

Into my utf-8-encoded page I want to insert the name of the current month, which happens to be March, in German "M?rz" - with umlaut. If you use

   setlocale(LC_TIME, 'de_DE');
   echo strftime("%B");

this will return "M&auml;rz", but that html-entity will look like this on a utf-8 page: "M?rz". Not what I want.

But if you use

   setlocale(LC_TIME, 'de_DE.UTF8');  // note the charset info !
   echo strftime("%B");

this returns "M¡Ì¡ìrz", which, on utf-8, looks like it should: "M?rz".

bruno dot cenou at revues dot org (20-Feb-2006 02:31)

A little function to test available locales on a sytem :

<?php
function list_system_locales(){
   
ob_start();
   
system('locale -a');
   
$str = ob_get_contents();
   
ob_end_clean();
    return
split("\\n", trim($str));
}

$locale = "fr_FR.UTF8";
$locales = list_system_locales();

if(
in_array($locale, $locales)){
        echo
"yes yes yes....";
}else{
        echo
"no no no.......";
}

?>

Edwin Martin (20-Feb-2006 12:29)

Debian users: Addition to Gabor Deri's note: if setlocale doesn't work in your locale and you're on Debian, and Gabor Deri's note doesn't work, you have to install the locales package.

As root, type: "apt-get install locales" and it will be installed.

glenn at europlan dot no (30-Nov-2005 07:55)

In most Unix/Linux system, you could use:

locale -a

This will list all available locales on the server.

birkholz at web dot de (15-Aug-2005 04:42)

When i tried to get the current locale (e.g. after i set the lang to german with setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE'); ), the following did not work on my suse linux 9.0-box:
$currentLocale = setlocale(LC_ALL, NULL);
This code did a reset to the server-setting.

$currentLocale = setlocale(LC_ALL, 0); works perfectly for me, but the manual says NULL and 0 are equal in this case, but NULL seems to act like "".

pigmeu at pigmeu dot net (18-Oct-2004 09:42)

!!WARNING!!

The "locale" always depend on the server configuration.

i.e.:
When trying to use "pt_BR" on some servers you will ALWAYS get false. Even with other languages.

The locale string need to be supported by the server. Sometimes there are diferents charsets for a language, like "pt_BR.utf-8" and "pt_BR.iso-8859-1", but there is no support for a _standard_ "pt_BR".

This problem occours in Windows platform too. Here you need to call "portuguese" or "spanish" or "german" or...

Maybe the only way to try to get success calling the function setlocale() is:
setlocale(LC_ALL, "pt_BR", "pt_BR.iso-8859-1", "pt_BR.utf-8", "portuguese", ...);

But NEVER trust on that when making functions like date conversions or number formating. The best way to make sure you are doing the right thing, is using the default "en_US" or "en_UK", by not calling the setlocale() function. Or, make sure that your server support the lang you want to use, with some tests.

Remember that: Using the default locale setings is the best way to "talk" with other applications, like dbs or rpc servers, too.

[]s

Pigmeu

dv at josheli dot com (13-Aug-2004 12:04)

On Novell Netware, the language codes require hyphens, not underscores, and using anything other than LC_ALL doesn't work directly.

So... (from their support list)....

You have to set TIME, NUMERIC etc. info in two steps as given below rather than one. This is due to the limitation of setlocale function of LibC.
<?php
   setlocale
(LC_ALL, 'es-ES');
  
$loc = setlocale(LC_TIME, NULL);
   echo
strftime("%A %e %B %Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));
 
// jeuves 22 diciembre 1978
?>
This should work.

or of course, reset LC_ALL...
<?php
setlocale
(LC_ALL, 'es-ES');
echo
strftime("%A %e %B %Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));
setlocale(LC_ALL, '');
// jeuves 22 diciembre 1978
?>

bogdan at iHost dot ro (02-Mar-2004 10:53)

On some systems (at least FreeBSD 4.x) the format for a `locale' is, for example, ro_RO.ISO8859-2. If you use ro_RO instead setlocale will return FALSE. Just browse in /usr/share/locale and see what is the name of the directory holding your `locale' and use that name in your scripts:

<?php
  clearstatcache
();
 
$pos = strrpos ($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"], "/");
 
$fisier = substr ($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"], $pos + 1);
 
$result = filemtime ($fisier);
 
$local = setlocale (LC_TIME, 'ro_RO.ISO8859-2');
  if (
$local == "ro_RO.ISO8859-2") {
   
$modtime = strftime '%e&nbsp;%B&nbsp;%Y&nbsp;%H:%M', $result);
  } else {
   
$modtime = strftime ('%d.%m.%Y&nbsp;%H:%M', $result);
  }
 
printf ("Ultima&nbsp;actualizare: %s\\n", $modtime);
?>

mk at totu dot com (26-Jan-2004 12:59)

Be carefull - setting a locale which uses commas instead of dots in numbers may cause a mysql db not to understand the query:
<?php
setlocale
(LC_ALL,"pl");
$price = 1234 / 100; // now the price looks like 12,34
$query = mysql_query("SELECT Id FROM table WHERE price='".$price."'");
?>
Even if there is a price 12.34 - nothing will be found

r dot nospam dot velseboer at quicknet dot nospam dot nl (09-Sep-2002 03:02)

be careful with the LC_ALL setting, as it may introduce some unwanted conversions. For example, I used

setlocale (LC_ALL, "Dutch");

to get my weekdays in dutch on the page. From that moment on (as I found out many hours later) my floating point values from MYSQL where interpreted as integers because the Dutch locale wants a comma (,) instead of a point (.) before the decimals. I tried printf, number_format, floatval.... all to no avail. 1.50 was always printed as 1.00 :(

When I set my locale to :

 setlocale (LC_TIME, "Dutch");

my weekdays are good now and my floating point values too.

I hope I can save some people the trouble of figuring this out by themselves.

Rob

jorg-spamm at omnimedia dot no (03-Jul-2002 07:23)

I needed to compile and install some extra locales to get this to work on RH7.3. Probably just me not doing a proper installation, but this is what it took to fix it:

localedef -ci no_NO -f ISO_8859-1 no_NO

elindset at hoved dot net (12-May-2002 10:59)

In FreeBSD I had to use no_NO.ISO8859-1 instead of just no_NO..

<?PHP
    setlocale
(LC_ALL, 'no_NO.ISO8859-1');
    echo
strftime ("%A %e %B %Y", time());
?>

misc dot anders at feder dot dk (19-Jun-2001 02:13)

Under FreeBSD, locale definitions are stored in the /usr/share/locale/ directory. Danish time formats and weekdays, for instance, are stored in /usr/share/locale/da_DK.ISO_8859-1/LC_TIME.

noog at libero dot it (23-Nov-2000 11:13)

On windows:
Control Panel->International Settings
You can set your locale and customize it
And locale-related PHP functions work perfectly

Morgan Christiansson &lt;mog at linux dot nu&gt; (29-Mar-2000 08:56)

check /usr/share/locale/ if you want more info about the locale available with your *NIX box

there is also a file called /usr/share/locale/locale.alias with a list of aliases
such as swedish for sv_SE

so on all boxes i have accounts on (rh 6.0 and slack 3.4) you can just use setlocale("LC_ALL","swedish"); or other prefered language in plain english.

However, the weekdays were in all lowercase :(

Note: export LC_ALL=swedish made a lot of programs swedish for me, it's also possible to make them russian or japanese :)

Lucas Thompson <lucas at slf dot cx> (31-Jan-2000 10:57)

The Open Group has an excellent document available on the setlocale() library function, most of which applies to the PHP function of the same name.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xbd/locale.html

WARNING: This document might be a little too complex for people who came from HTML to PHP.

If you migrated from the world of C programming you'll be a locale master after reading this document.