PHP : Function Reference : String Functions : setlocale PHP Examples Tutorials References

lucas thompson

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.

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 "MÃ¤rz" - with umlaut. If you use setlocale(LC_TIME, 'de_DE'); echo strftime("%B"); this will return "März", 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 "MâˆšÂ§rz", which, on utf-8, looks like it should: "MÃ¤rz".

noog

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

bogdan

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 %B %Y %H:%M', $result); } else { $modtime = strftime ('%d.%m.%Y %H:%M', $result); } printf ("Ultima actualizare: %s\\n", $modtime); ?>

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 ?>

grmela

Just in case you freshly installed some new locales and they doesn't seem to work with setlocale(), don't forget to restart your webserver. It may save you some time browsing your code trying to fix it there :)

glenn

In most Unix/Linux system, you could use: locale -a This will list all available locales on the server.

elindset

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()); ?>

periklis

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.

gabor deri

IMPORTANT notice for DEBIAN linux users: after the upgrade to the new stable (woody), you may have encountered that setlocale is not working at all, even though you have the files in the /usr/share/locale directory and everything was fine before the upgrade. in this case look at the /etc/locale.gen file, which contains the generated locales. if it is empty, you do not have any useful locales. to generate the needed locales run 'dpkg-reconfigure locales' as root and select the locales you need.

sven k

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

lifeless

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

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.

jorg-spamm

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

szepeshazi

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.

edwin martin

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.

morgan christiansson <mog

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 :)

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

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

bruno dot cenou

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......."; } ?>

pigmeu

!!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

setlocale

Set locale information (PHP 4, PHP 5)
string setlocale ( int category, string locale [, string ...] )

string setlocale ( int category, array locale )

Example 2428. setlocale() Examples

Example 2429. setlocale() Examples for Windows

Related Examples ( Source code ) » setlocale

Code Examples / Notes » setlocale

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