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setlocale

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

setlocale — Set locale information

Description

string setlocale ( int $category , string $locale [, string $... ] )

string setlocale ( int $category , array $locale )

Sets locale information.

Parameters

category

category is a named constant specifying the category of the functions affected by the locale setting:

LC_ALL for all of the below
LC_COLLATE for string comparison, see strcoll()
LC_CTYPE for character classification and conversion, for example strtoupper()
LC_MONETARY for localeconv()
LC_NUMERIC for decimal separator (See also localeconv())
LC_TIME for date and time formatting with strftime()
LC_MESSAGES for system responses (available if PHP was compiled with libintl)

locale

If locale is NULL or the empty string "", the locale names will be set from the values of environment variables with the same names as the above categories, or from "LANG".

If locale is "0", the locale setting is not affected, only the current setting is returned.

If locale is an array or followed by additional parameters then each array element or parameter is tried to be set as new locale until success. This is useful if a locale is known under different names on different systems or for providing a fallback for a possibly not available locale.

...

Return Values

Returns the new current locale, or FALSE if the locale functionality is not implemented on your platform, the specified locale does not exist or the category name is invalid.

An invalid category name also causes a warning message. Category/locale names can be found in » RFC 1766 and » ISO 639. Different systems have different naming schemes for locales.

Note: The return value of setlocale() depends on the system that PHP is running. It returns exactly what the system setlocale function returns.

ChangeLog

Version Description

4.3.0 Passing multiple locales became possible.

4.2.0 Passing category as a string is now deprecated, use the above constants instead. Passing them as a string (within quotes) will result in a warning message.

Version	Description
4.3.0	Passing multiple locales became possible.
4.2.0	Passing `category` as a string is now deprecated, use the above constants instead. Passing them as a string (within quotes) will result in a warning message.

Examples

Example #1 setlocale() Examples


<?php
/* Set locale to Dutch */
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_NL');

/* Output: vrijdag 22 december 1978 */
echo strftime("%A %e %B %Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));

/* try different possible locale names for german as of PHP 4.3.0 */
$loc_de = setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE@euro', 'de_DE', 'de', 'ge');
echo "Preferred locale for german on this system is '$loc_de'";
?>

Example #2 setlocale() Examples for Windows


<?php
/* Set locale to Dutch */
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nld_nld');

/* Output: vrijdag 22 december 1978 */
echo strftime("%A %d %B %Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));

/* try different possible locale names for german as of PHP 4.3.0 */
$loc_de = setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE@euro', 'de_DE', 'deu_deu');
echo "Preferred locale for german on this system is '$loc_de'";
?>

Notes

Warning

The locale information is maintained per process, not per thread. If you are running PHP on a multithreaded server api like IIS or Apache on Windows you may experience sudden changes of locale settings while a script is running although the script itself never called setlocale() itself. This happens due to other scripts running in different threads of the same process at the same time changing the processwide locale using setlocale().

Tip

Windows users will find useful information about locale strings at Microsoft's MSDN website. Supported language strings can be found at » http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/_crt_language_strings.asp and supported country/region strings at » http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclib/html/_crt_country_strings.asp. Windows systems support the three letter codes for country/region specified by ISO 3166-Alpha-3, which can be found at this » Unicode website.

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add a note User Contributed Notes
setlocale

Georg
04-Apr-2008 06:31


To set locale to 'de_DE' on my Debian 4 machine I had to:

- uncomment 'de_DE' in file /etc/locale.gen and afterwards

- run locale-gen from the shell

bryn AT lunarvis DOT com
21-Jan-2008 10:04


Posting this in the hope it might be useful to others, as I could find very little info anywhere. If you want to use a Welsh locale and have the suitable language support installed, you pass 'cym' (abbreviated form of Cymraeg) to setlocale:



<?php

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'cym');

$welsh= gmstrftime("%A, %B %Y - %H:%M",time());

echo $welsh;

?>



The above certainly applies to Windows systems, but should also apply to Unix if the required support is installed.



Cheers,



Bryn.

ostapk
27-Dec-2007 07:39


There is a new PECL extension under development called intl (it will be available in PHP5.3). Meanwhile all who rely on the setlocale() and friends should be aware about the limitations of them as covered in this post on the onPHP5.com blog: http://www.onphp5.com/article/22

Periklis
13-Sep-2007 06:33


In *some* Windows systems, setting LC_TIME only will not work, you must either set LC_ALL or both LC_CTYPE and LC_TIME. BUT if you have already set LC_TIME using setlocale earlier in the script, dates will not be affected! For example:

<?php

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'greek');

setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'greek');

?>

will not work, while 

<?php

setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'greek');

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'greek');

?>

will do the job.

mvanbaak
09-May-2007 09:03


To complement Sven K's tip about debian:



You can also install the package locales-all

That one holds all the locales there are in compiled form.

szepeshazi at gmail dot com
19-Feb-2007 12:11


For those of you who are unfortunate enough (like me) to work in Windows environment, and try to set the locale to a language _and_ to UTF-8 charset, and were unable to do it, here is a workaround.



For example to output the date in hungarian with UTF-8 charset, this will work:



    $dateString = "%B %d., %A";

    setlocale(LC_ALL,'hungarian');

    $res=strftime($dateString);

    echo(iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8', $res));



If anybody knows how to set the locale on Windows to the equivalent of "hu_HU.UTF-8" on unix, please do tell me.

lifeless
21-Nov-2006 02:40


if your server is an ubuntu (debian like)

you need to install the locales you want (default is english and your language) go to aptitude and install -language-pack-*-base it will resolve dependencies and will try to install a suggested package, remove it if you don't care and proceed.

Clayton Smith
27-Sep-2006 03:15


If you already have all the locales installed and "locale -a" is only showing a few languages, then edit /etc/locale.gen and add a line, e.g., es_MX ISO-8859-1.  After you add the line, run the command locale-gen for it to generate the locales based on those settings.

Sven K
08-Jun-2006 07:08


If your system doesn't show any installed locales by "locale -a", try installing them by "dpkg-reconfigure locales" (on debian).

09-Mar-2006 05:17


The example from bruno dot cenou at revues dot org below shows the possibility, but I want to spell it out: you can add charset info to setlocale.



Example:



Into my utf-8-encoded page I want to insert the name of the current month, which happens to be March, in German "März" - with umlaut. If you use



   setlocale(LC_TIME, 'de_DE');

   echo strftime("%B");



this will return "M&auml;rz", but that html-entity will look like this on a utf-8 page: "M?rz". Not what I want.



But if you use



   setlocale(LC_TIME, 'de_DE.UTF8');  // note the charset info !

   echo strftime("%B");



this returns "M√§rz", which, on utf-8, looks like it should: "März".

bruno dot cenou at revues dot org
20-Feb-2006 11:31


A little function to test available locales on a sytem :



<?php

function list_system_locales(){

    ob_start();

    system('locale -a'); 

    $str = ob_get_contents();

    ob_end_clean();

    return split("\\n", trim($str));

}



$locale = "fr_FR.UTF8";

$locales = list_system_locales();



if(in_array($locale, $locales)){

        echo "yes yes yes....";

}else{

        echo "no no no.......";

}



?>

Edwin Martin
20-Feb-2006 09:29


Debian users: Addition to Gabor Deri's note: if setlocale doesn't work in your locale and you're on Debian, and Gabor Deri's note doesn't work, you have to install the locales package.



As root, type: "apt-get install locales" and it will be installed.

glenn at europlan dot no
30-Nov-2005 04:55


In most Unix/Linux system, you could use:



locale -a



This will list all available locales on the server.

birkholz at web dot de
15-Aug-2005 12:42


When i tried to get the current locale (e.g. after i set the lang to german with setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE'); ), the following did not work on my suse linux 9.0-box:

$currentLocale = setlocale(LC_ALL, NULL);

This code did a reset to the server-setting.



$currentLocale = setlocale(LC_ALL, 0); works perfectly for me, but the manual says NULL and 0 are equal in this case, but NULL seems to act like "".

pigmeu at pigmeu dot net
19-Oct-2004 05:42


!!WARNING!!



The "locale" always depend on the server configuration.



i.e.:

When trying to use "pt_BR" on some servers you will ALWAYS get false. Even with other languages.



The locale string need to be supported by the server. Sometimes there are diferents charsets for a language, like "pt_BR.utf-8" and "pt_BR.iso-8859-1", but there is no support for a _standard_ "pt_BR".



This problem occours in Windows platform too. Here you need to call "portuguese" or "spanish" or "german" or...



Maybe the only way to try to get success calling the function setlocale() is:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "pt_BR", "pt_BR.iso-8859-1", "pt_BR.utf-8", "portuguese", ...);



But NEVER trust on that when making functions like date conversions or number formating. The best way to make sure you are doing the right thing, is using the default "en_US" or "en_UK", by not calling the setlocale() function. Or, make sure that your server support the lang you want to use, with some tests.



Remember that: Using the default locale setings is the best way to "talk" with other applications, like dbs or rpc servers, too.



[]s



Pigmeu

dv at josheli dot com
13-Aug-2004 08:04


On Novell Netware, the language codes require hyphens, not underscores, and using anything other than LC_ALL doesn't work directly.



So... (from their support list)....



You have to set TIME, NUMERIC etc. info in two steps as given below rather than one. This is due to the limitation of setlocale function of LibC.

<?php

   setlocale(LC_ALL, 'es-ES');

   $loc = setlocale(LC_TIME, NULL);

   echo strftime("%A %e %B %Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));

  // jeuves 22 diciembre 1978

?>

This should work.



or of course, reset LC_ALL...

<?php

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'es-ES');

echo strftime("%A %e %B %Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));

setlocale(LC_ALL, '');

// jeuves 22 diciembre 1978

?>

bogdan at iHost dot ro
03-Mar-2004 07:53


On some systems (at least FreeBSD 4.x) the format for a `locale' is, for example, ro_RO.ISO8859-2. If you use ro_RO instead setlocale will return FALSE. Just browse in /usr/share/locale and see what is the name of the directory holding your `locale' and use that name in your scripts:



<?php

  clearstatcache();

  $pos = strrpos ($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"], "/");

  $fisier = substr ($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"], $pos + 1);

  $result = filemtime ($fisier);

  $local = setlocale (LC_TIME, 'ro_RO.ISO8859-2');

  if ($local == "ro_RO.ISO8859-2") {

    $modtime = strftime '%e&nbsp;%B&nbsp;%Y&nbsp;%H:%M', $result);

  } else {

    $modtime = strftime ('%d.%m.%Y&nbsp;%H:%M', $result);

  }

  printf ("Ultima&nbsp;actualizare: %s\\n", $modtime);

?>

mk at totu dot com
26-Jan-2004 09:59


Be carefull - setting a locale which uses commas instead of dots in numbers may cause a mysql db not to understand the query:


<?php


setlocale(LC_ALL,"pl");


$price = 1234 / 100; // now the price looks like 12,34


$query = mysql_query("SELECT Id FROM table WHERE price='".$price."'");


?>


Even if there is a price 12.34 - nothing will be found

r dot nospam dot velseboer at quicknet dot nospam dot nl
09-Sep-2002 11:02


be careful with the LC_ALL setting, as it may introduce some unwanted conversions. For example, I used 



setlocale (LC_ALL, "Dutch");



to get my weekdays in dutch on the page. From that moment on (as I found out many hours later) my floating point values from MYSQL where interpreted as integers because the Dutch locale wants a comma (,) instead of a point (.) before the decimals. I tried printf, number_format, floatval.... all to no avail. 1.50 was always printed as 1.00 :(



When I set my locale to :



 setlocale (LC_TIME, "Dutch");



my weekdays are good now and my floating point values too. 



I hope I can save some people the trouble of figuring this out by themselves.



Rob

jorg-spamm at omnimedia dot no
04-Jul-2002 03:23


I needed to compile and install some extra locales to get this to work on RH7.3. Probably just me not doing a proper installation, but this is what it took to fix it:



localedef -ci no_NO -f ISO_8859-1 no_NO

elindset at hoved dot net
13-May-2002 06:59


In FreeBSD I had to use no_NO.ISO8859-1 instead of just no_NO..



<?PHP

    setlocale (LC_ALL, 'no_NO.ISO8859-1');

    echo strftime ("%A %e %B %Y", time());

?>

misc dot anders at feder dot dk
19-Jun-2001 10:13


Under FreeBSD, locale definitions are stored in the /usr/share/locale/ directory. Danish time formats and weekdays, for instance, are stored in /usr/share/locale/da_DK.ISO_8859-1/LC_TIME.

noog at libero dot it
24-Nov-2000 08:13


On windows:


Control Panel->International Settings


You can set your locale and customize it


And locale-related PHP functions work perfectly

Morgan Christiansson <mog at linux dot nu>
29-Mar-2000 05:56


check /usr/share/locale/ if you want more info about the locale available with your *NIX box





there is also a file called /usr/share/locale/locale.alias with a list of aliases


such as swedish for sv_SE





so on all boxes i have accounts on (rh 6.0 and slack 3.4) you can just use setlocale("LC_ALL","swedish"); or other prefered language in plain english.





However, the weekdays were in all lowercase :(





Note: export LC_ALL=swedish made a lot of programs swedish for me, it's also possible to make them russian or japanese :)

Lucas Thompson <lucas at slf dot cx>
31-Jan-2000 07:57


The Open Group has an excellent document available on the setlocale() library function, most of which applies to the PHP function of the same name.





http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xbd/locale.html





WARNING: This document might be a little too complex for people who came from HTML to PHP.





If you migrated from the world of C programming you'll be a locale master after reading this document.

add a note

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