php strftime French characters

Question

I\'m working on a site where the user can switch between English and French. To output the date of posts.

If the user chooses French I use:

setlocale         


        

Answer 1

This seems to be a problem / bug with the strftime function.

You can solve it using:

$date_string = utf8_encode(strftime('%d %B %Y', strtotime($post->post_date)));

Answer 2

If you display your page with utf8 encoding, you want to get utf8 out of strftime.

If php's charset is utf8, then you're cooking. If not, you can :

• utf8_encode() the output of strftime.

• append '.utf8' to your locale statement if this locale is installed on your system, as in setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_FR.utf8')

• change php's default charset, by putting the line AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 in your php.ini or your .htaccess

Answer 3

Had this issue but header(), utf8_encode() & setlocale() weren't working and we did not know the actual encoding. This is how we solved it (if it helps anyone) :

// $date_start is a DateTime instance
$month = strftime("%b", $date_start->getTimestamp());

// The default value for the 3rd argument is FALSE, this can cause issues
$encoding = mb_detect_encoding($month, 'auto', true);

// We can now correctly convert the string to UTF-8
$converted = mb_convert_encoding($month, 'UTF-8', $encoding);

Note: utf8_encode expects to encode from a ISO-8859-1 encoded string only.

Manual:

• DateTime::getTimestamp()
• mb_detect_encoding()
• mb_convert_encoding()