PHP date - get name of the months in local language - php

Question

I have this part of the function, which gives me name of the months in English. How can I translate them to my local language (Serbian)?
$month_name = date('F', mktime(0, 0, 0, $i));
Where $i is the number of the month (values 1 - 12). See also PHP:mktime.

Answer 1

You should use setlocale():
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'fr_FR');
$month_name = date('F', mktime(0, 0, 0, $i));
In this case it would set it to French. For your case it should be one of the following:
sr_BA - Serbian (Montenegro)
sr_CS - Serbian (Serbia)
sr_ME - Serbian (Serbia and Montenegro)

Answer 2

You should use setlocale() and strftime():
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'sr_CS');
$month_name = strftime('%B', mktime(0, 0, 0, $i));

Answer 3

Here is an example with IntlDateFormatter
$format = new IntlDateFormatter('sr_CS', IntlDateFormatter::NONE,
IntlDateFormatter::NONE, NULL, NULL, "MMM");
$monthName = datefmt_format($format, mktime(0, 0, 0, $i));

Answer 4

For all who struggle with German (and de_DE), make sure you are using the right language code. Login to your server and run locale -a to see a list of all available ones. For me it shows:
CC.UTF-8de_AT.utf8de_BE.utf8de_CH.utf8de_DE.utf8de_LI.utf8de_LU.utf8...
You need to use one of those codes.
Then you can use:
date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Berlin');
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE.utf8');
$date_now = date('Y-m-d');
$month_available = strftime('%B %Y', strtotime($date_now));
$month_next = strftime('%B %Y', strtotime($date_now.' +1 month'));
and "März 2020" etc. get displayed correctly.

Answer 5

This question asks how to get a list of months, I only see hints, not a complete code answer so:
If you have IntlDateFormatter available - which is available in most of the cases, you can create a formatter in a given locale and repeatedly push a date to it created just based on month number
// or any other locales like pl_PL, cs_CZ, fr_FR, zh, zh_Hans, ...
$locale = 'en_GB';
$dateFormatter = new IntlDateFormatter(
$locale,
IntlDateFormatter::LONG, // date type
IntlDateFormatter::NONE // time type
);
$dateFormatter->setPattern('LLLL'); // full month name with NO DECLENSION ;-)
$months_locale = [];
for ($month_number = 1; $month_number <= 12; ++$month_number) {
$months_locale[] = $dateFormatter->format(
// 'n' => month number with no leading zeros
DateTime::createFromFormat('n', (string)$month_number)
);
}
// test output
echo "<pre>";
var_dump($months_locale);
echo "</pre>";
Note: LLLL takes care of not-declining, but it does not take care of the lowercase/uppercase of the first letter if the languages has such things.Good example is that you can get January for en_GB but leden for cs_CZ
If you want all letters lowercase => use mb_strtolower($month_name); - docs
If you want just the FIRST letter to be upper case =>
=> use mb_convert_case($month_name, MB_CASE_TITLE, 'UTF-8'); - docs
Always use mb_* functions or their variations for locale-originating strings !
So no, don't use ucfirst !

Answer 6

It is good idea to pass the encoding when setting the locale:
<?php
date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Belgrade');
setlocale(LC_TIME, array('sr_CS.UTF-8', 'sr.UTF-8'));