Laravel best way of using setlocale with carbon

Question

I am new to the laravel framework and OOP. I am building a small webapp.

One of the things what comes back every time on the website is the date of today. To generate the date of today I use Carbon like so

{{ carbon\carbon::today()->formatLocalized(' %d %B %Y') }} in my view.

That works fine and gives me back the following: "1 March 2017". Because my application is suppose to be in dutch i've searched for a function to set the dates to dutch. I've found this: setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_NL'); What works just fine except I have to add it to every controller method I use for the views where I need the date.

Is there a better/cleaner solution for this? Like somewhere I can set it global.

Answer 1

Two ways:

1) a BaseController class, in the __construct() you can use setlocale(), next you derive every localized controller from the BaseController class. 2) in a middleware

Dont know if your locale can change per request (i.e. ?locale=xx), is stored on authenticad user or others way, but the 2 methods above should works with fixed or changing locale.

I use the middleware way:

 public function handle($request, Closure $next)
 {
    $locale = false;
    if(Auth::user()){
        $locale = Auth::user()->locale;
    }elseif(session()->has('locale')) {
        $locale = session('locale');
    }elseif($request->has('locale')) {
        $locale = request('locale');
    }
    if($locale && array_key_exists($locale, config('app.locales'))) {
        app()->setLocale($locale);
        setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
    }
    return $next($request);
}