solved Problem displaying a datetime field in spanish

[landitus]

Hi all! As always, a pleasure working with PW! But I'm stuck with the following. I have a blog-type page where each entry has a date time field. I've configured the date output as: "j \d\e F \d\e Y". But the month is shown in English (ex. November) I need to use the date in spanish, but I've read some php docs and they say I should use setlocale with strftime. But the output date I get from PW should be as an Unix timestamp I believe.

How would you approach this?

[ryan]

Try this where you output the date:

<?php
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'es_ES'); // substitute your locale if not es_ES
echo strftime('%e de %B de %Y', $page->getUnformatted('date')); // substitute your date field name

This should produce the following output for today's date:

8 de noviembre de 2011

We're going to be providing localization support for the date field with ProcessWire 2.2, but the method described here will continue to be backwards compatible.

Note you can also put the setlocale() part in your /site/config.php if you prefer.

What locale you can use depends somewhat on what are installed on your server. I think that es_ES (or es_ES.UTF-8) is fairly standard, but if you want to get a list of locales you can type this in the unix shell:

locale -a 

[apeisa]

Just 5 min ago used setlocale for finnish content. Had to install it first (on ubuntu): sudo apt-get install language-pack-fi-base and after that this spell did the magic: setlocale(LC_ALL, array('fi_FI.UTF-8','fi_FI@euro','fi_FI','finnish'));

I found help from here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.setlocale.php#90919

Actually on ubuntu it seems that only different en_ locales are installed by default. Probably most web hosts have most popular languages covered.

[landitus]

Ryan, it worked perfectly! The key was the getUnformatted date! I ended up placing this i config.php:

$config->timezone = 'America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires';
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'es_ES');

Thank you very much!!!  

[apeisa]

Just noticed that setlocale() stops working if you have multilang support installed.. and this is probably pretty common situation

setlocale(LC_ALL, 0) returns C, no matter what you set it before.

Not sure if this is related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3398113/php-gettext-problems

[ryan]

Actually LanguageSupport includes a setLocale setting, but it needs to be defined with the language pack. If you go into Setup > Languages > [your language] > add translation file >

Then paste in:

/wire/modules/LanguageSupport/LanguageSupport.module

You'll see a field come up where you can set the locale. Maybe I should have this disabled by default? (if the translation doesn't define it)

[apeisa]

I think that disabling should be fine. This is pretty hard one to solve if one doesn't know that this file has settings like that. (But it is great to have as a setting indeed!).

[ryan]

Just to make sure I understand correctly. Do you think it's best to replace this (in LanguageSupport.module):

setlocale(LC_ALL, $this->_('C')); 

with this?

$locale = $this->_('none'); 
if($locale != 'none') setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale); 

The above would only call setlocale() if the language defined a locale in the translations.

[apeisa]

Yes, I think that would be better.

[ryan]

Sounds good, I will update.