Translating PHP date() for Multilingual Site

Whenever you need to manipulate date/time stamps based on locale, you should use strftime:

switch ($lang) {
    case 'en':
        setlocale(LC_TIME, 'en_CA.UTF-8');
        echo strftime("%B %e, %G");
        break;
    case 'fr':
        setlocale(LC_TIME, 'fr_CA.UTF-8');
        echo strftime("%e %B %G");
        break;
}

Results:

February 11, 2011  // en
11 février 2011    // fr

Of course, you need to have the locales installed on your system. In Ubuntu per example:

bash-4.1$ sudo locale-gen fr_CA.UTF-8

EDIT in may 2022

strftime() has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 8.1.0

This is how you should do it:

$fmt = datefmt_create(
    'pt_BR', // The output language.
    \IntlDateFormatter::FULL,
    \IntlDateFormatter::FULL,
    pattern: "cccc, d 'de' LLLL 'de' YYYY" // The output formatting.
);
$input = strtotime('20-06-2022');
$output = datefmt_format($fmt, $input);

var_dump($output); // Outputs "segunda-feira, 20 de junho de 2022".

As for strtotime() use:

• slash (/) for American M/D/Y formatting;
• dash (-) for European D-M-Y formatting and
• period (.) for ISO Y.M.D formatting.

In my sample I am using the european day-month-year formatting.

Click here to see how to format the value of $pattern parameter in datefmt_create().

You must have the intl package installed:

$ sudo apt install php8.1-intl

Change the 8.1 bit to the php version you are working with.

    $date =  date('F', $start).' '.date('j',$start).', '.date('Y', $start);

That's a rather painful way to go about. The format string in date() doesn't have to be a single character. This line could be reduced to

$date = date('F j Y');

And given that, you could have a simple

switch($whats_my_locale) {
    case 'FR':
       $format = 'date format characters for a french date';
       break
    case 'EN' :
       $format = 'format chars for english date'
       break
    case etc....
    default:
       $format = 'default date format string here';
}

$local_date_string = date($format, $start);

and off you go.