Changing locale date language in PHP

Question

I cannot seem to change the language of a date to Finnish. I installed the finnish language pack in my Linux install, restarted Nginx, and am using the following code :

<li><center>
?>Mitätöidä Myöhemmin <?echo date('l jS \of F Y');?></center></li>
        </ul>
        </div>
</div>

What am I doing wrong here?

Because PHP obeys you. It does what you tell it to, not what you have in mind. You need to specifically tell PHP to display the date in a particular locale. Use [`setlocale()`](http://php.net/setlocale) for that. See [example](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1328060/). — Amal Murali, Feb 17 '14 at 15:58
From the manual: *To format dates in other languages, you should use the setlocale() and strftime() functions instead of date().* — Álvaro González, Feb 17 '14 at 16:00

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 17 '14 at 16:02

date() will always output dates in the English language. If you wish to output them to a specific language, you'll need to use strftime() and pass in the necessary format.

You'll also need to tell PHP which language it should use with setlocale():

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fi_FI');
echo strftime("%A %e %B %Y");

Changing locale date language in PHP

1 Answers1