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php setlocale adding 'b' before any variable with date

This line of code: $date = strftime("%B", strtotime(Date("F"))) . " " . Date("y"); is supposed to return: "March 18", according to the below locale config

cat /etc/locale.conf
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

What I have in my php file is: setlocale(LC_TIME, 'pt_PT');, in order to return : "Março 18". Previously, this was working just fine, but what is happening today is that the value $date is returning b"Março 18".

My 'trial-by-combat' resulted in these 5 final results:

$str = "Hi";
$dateOne = strftime("%B", strtotime(Date("F")));
$dateTwo = Date("y");
$strAndDateOne = $str.$dateOn;
$strAndDateTwo = $str.$dateTwo;

Output:

dd($str,$dateOne,$dateTwo,$strAndDateOne,$strAndDateTwo);

"Hi"
b"Março"
"18"
b"HiMarço"
"Hi18"

I have no idea what that b is and my function stopped working. (I honestly can't remember if the b was there previously, but I'm positive that it wasn't).

What was different from before to now: I created a swapfile (between yesterday and today) that is no longer in use and that was the only thing I've done on the machine.

Solution

  • I know that this topic is old, but in order to fix this issue you will need to put your "strftime" method inside the "utf8_encode" method:

    utf8_encode(strftime("%B", strtotime(Date("F"))));