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phputf-8non-ascii-charactersstrftimechinese-locale

Outputting dates in non-ASCII characters with PHP

I'm trying to output the date in Traditional Chinese.

I have the date as a Unix timestamp, ( example: "1467244800" ).

I am doing the following:

<?php
setlocale (LC_TIME, "zh_TW");
echo strftime("%e %B %Y", $timestamp );
?>

What I'm getting output is the Unicode "Undefined" characters:

30 ���� 2016
17 �T�� 2016
18 �Q�G�� 2015

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

My HTML headers contain:

<html lang="zh-TW">
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

And the rest of my Chinese content on the page is outputting fine. If you view the page source you see:

<span>最新消息</span>
<span class="pipe">18 �Q�G�� 2015</span>

It's only the strftime() dates that appear as "Undefined" characters: ����...

Thanks for looking...

Solution

  • Locales not only come in different languages, but also different encodings. The default zh_TW locale will probably use some Chinese encoding, while what you want is UTF-8. Hence, use the UTF-8 version of the locale:

    setlocale(LC_TIME, 'zh_TW.UTF-8');

    This depends on your specific system and what locales are installed on it. Check that on the command line:

    $ locale -a
...
zh_TW
zh_TW.Big5
zh_TW.UTF-8

    To be more cross-platform compatible, you can try several locales:

    setlocale(LC_TIME, 'zh_TW.UTF-8', 'zh_TW.utf8', 'zh_TW');