Search code examples
phplaravellaravel-5php-carbon

Bad characters in utf-8 Carbon formatLocalized

I know there is much about this, but it doesn't work, I have the language installed.

locale -a | grep es
 es_ES
 es_ES.ISO8859-1
 es_ES.ISO8859-15
 es_ES.UTF-8

I have set to utf-8

\Carbon\Carbon::setUtf8(true);
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'es_ES.UTF-8');
$game_date = $date->formatLocalized('%A %d %B %Y %H %M %p');

I have the utf-8 tag in my html

<meta charset="utf-8">

but I am still getting the wrong characters.

"sábado" - "miércoles"

Solution

  • I had the same problem when trying to use the sk_SK.UTF-8 locale. What helped me to solve the problem was to remove the \Carbon\Carbon::setUtf8(true); portion of the code.

    But why does it work like this? Firstly the Carbon documentation regarding the setUtf8 function says this:

    Some languages require utf8 encoding to be printed (locale packages that does not ends with .UTF8 mainly). In this case you can use the static method Carbon::setUtf8() to encode the result of the formatLocalized() call to the utf8 charset.

    Upon examining the source code for Carbon the formatLocalized() function calls utf8_encode() function from the PHP library if we previously set the variable utf8 to true with the already mentioned Carbon::setUtf8(true). Carbon source on GitHub

    return static::$utf8 ? utf8_encode($formatted) : $formatted;

    Because your locale is already configured to use the UTF-8 standard the further php encoding messes the formatted string up.

    I figured that if you want to use Carbon to format your strings to utf8 you must first get rid of the UTF-8 encoding when setting your locale with setLocale(). However, I would just stick to removing the Carbon function and using the proper locale.

    TL;DR

    Use correct locale with UTF-8 encoding e.g. es_ES.UTF-8 or use try to use locale without the UTF-8 encoding and rely on \Carbon\Carbon::setUtf8(true); and utf8_encode() function. I suggest the first option. Hope this helped :)