Change date string from Dutch to English to use it in strtotime - php

Question

I have the following Dutch string date:
dinsdag, 18 april 2017
Now I want to strip the day and the month, and I can do that with the following example, but that doesn't work because its in Dutch and strtotime only works with English strings.
$stripDay = date('d',strtotime($date));
$stripMonth = date('m',strtotime($date));
So I checked for other options, and I found strptime function which states that it can work.
$format = '%l, %d %m %Y';
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'NL_nl');
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_NL');
First I configured the format, and then I set the Locale. But if I use the following code it still gives me 1's back.
$stripDay = date('d',strptime($date));
$stripMonth = date('m',strptime($date));
Can someone explain to me what I am doing wrong here?

Answer 1

you can define array which contain english days and dutch day and then you can replace dutch string with english string like this:
<?php
function dutch_strtotime($datetime) {
$days = array(
"maandag" => "Monday",
"dinsdag" => "Tuesday",
"woensdag" => "Wednesday",
"donderdag" => "Thursday",
"vrijdag" => "Friday",
"zaterdag" => "Saturday",
"zondag" => "Sunday"
);
$months = array(
"januari" => "January",
"februari" => "February",
"maart" => "March",
"april" => "April",
"mei" => "May",
"juni" => "June",
"juli" => "July",
"augustus" => "August",
"september" => "September",
"oktober" => "October",
"november" => "November",
"december" => "December"
);
$array = explode(" ", $datetime);
$array[0] = $days[strtolower($array[0])];
$array[2] = $months[strtolower($array[2])];
return strtotime(implode(" ", $array));
}
$date = "woensdag 22 oktober 2014 08:41:42";
echo date("l d-m-Y H:i:s", dutch_strtotime($date)) . "<br />";
echo date("d-m-Y", dutch_strtotime($date));
?>

Answer 2

If you're running PHP with Intl you can use the IntlDateFormatter class rather than rolling your own translations:
$df = IntlDateFormatter::create(
'nl_NL',
IntlDateFormatter::FULL,
IntlDateFormatter::FULL,
'Europe/Amsterdam',
IntlDateFormatter::GREGORIAN,
'eeee, d MMMM yyyy'
);
// since the time is omitted from the string
// it uses 00:00 - which meant the timestamp
// was an hour off for me in the UK so it
// was rolling the date back to 23:00 the
// previous day. Forcing UTC sorts this.
$df->setTimeZone('Etc/UTC');
// outputs '2017-04-18'
echo date('Y-m-d', $df->parse('dinsdag, 18 april 2017'));
You'll probably need the ICU date format guide handy though as it's different to normal PHP date formatting (hence 'eeee' for the day).