PHP - locale specific date format for English and French - php

Question

Locale specific dates present an interesting problem, not only do we need to specify the appropriate translation (Ex: September=>septembre) but we also need to ensure the format is in the right order (Ex: September 15, 2018=>15 septembre 2018)
PHP's date function date() is English only, so that can be immediately disregared.
Instead, my "research" has pointed me to strftime(). I prepared the following code: echo strftime('%b %e, %Y',strtotime($date));
This outputs: May 1, 2018 and mai 1, 2018. This seemed to solve the issue, that is until we had our bilingual testers identify that the days should be formatted 1 mai 2018.
What is the best way of dealing with this, is it a static class? I want to prepare our solution following best practices, but I have not found the answer.
class LocaleDate
{
public static function date($date)
{
$locale = setlocale(LC_ALL, 0);
if ($locale == "fr_CA" || $locale == "fr_CA.UTF-8") {
return strftime('%e %b %Y',strtotime($date));
} else {
return strftime('%b %e, %Y',strtotime($date));
}
}
}
echo LocaleDate::date($date)
Would that be the best way to go about this issue? Needing to identifty the locale and outputting from there? Seems tedious if you have multiple languages to deal with.

Answer 1

Use the DateTime class alongside the IntlDateFormatter.
Example:
<?php
$dt = new DateTime;
$formatter = new IntlDateFormatter('fr_FR', IntlDateFormatter::SHORT, IntlDateFormatter::SHORT);
$formatter->setPattern('E d.M.yyyy');
echo $formatter->format($dt);
Output:
jeu. 17.5.2018
Have a play with it here: https://3v4l.org/tuEM0
Check the documentation here: http://php.net/manual/en/class.intldateformatter.php