How the strftime Function Supports Multilingual and Region-Specific Date Formats? Practical Guide

gitbox 2025-09-21

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Title: How the strftime Function Supports Multilingual and Region-Specific Date Formats? Practical Guide
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// Main content starts
echo "<h2>Practical Guide to Using strftime for Multilingual and Region-Specific Date Formats</h2>";

// 1. Introduction to the strftime function
echo "<p>In PHP, the <code>strftime()

"; echo "

Commonly used format specifiers:

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%A - Full name of the day
%a - Abbreviated name of the day
%B - Full name of the month
%b - Abbreviated name of the month
%d - Day of the month (two digits)
%Y - Four-digit year

"; // 4. Support for Multilingual Display echo "

3. Multilingual Display Support

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As long as the setlocale() function is set correctly, strftime will automatically display dates according to the language. For example:

"; echo "

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'de_DE.UTF-8'); // Set to German
echo strftime('%A, %d %B %Y'); // Outputs 'Dienstag, 26 August 2025'

"; // 5. Notes echo "

4. Important Notes

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Locale names on Windows may differ. For instance, Chinese uses Chinese_China, and English uses English_United States.
Ensure that your PHP environment supports the required encoding, such as UTF-8. Otherwise, characters like Chinese or special symbols may display incorrectly.
Starting from PHP 8.1, strftime() has been deprecated, and it is recommended to use IntlDateFormatter for international date formatting.

"; // 6. Conclusion echo "

Conclusion

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By using setlocale() along with strftime(), PHP can easily handle multilingual and region-specific date formatting. This is a quick and efficient solution for websites that need to display internationalized date formats.

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