Internationalisation and my PHP Development Infrastructure

By Tony Marston
2005-07-17


My Implementation - Handling Dates

I already use a standardised class to handle all my date validation (refer to A class for validating and formatting dates) so all I needed to do was change this:

    $this->monthalpha = array(1 => 'Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May','Jun',

                                   'Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec');

or

    $this->monthalpha = array(1 => 'Janv', 'Févr', 'Mars', 'Avr', 'Mai', 'Juin',

                                   'Juil', 'Août', 'Sept', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Déc');

to this:

    $this->monthalpha = getLanguageArray('month_names_short');

As my default output format for dates is 'dd Mmm yyyy' this means that the 'Mmm' portion will use whatever language text is available.

Please note the following:

• The month names should be no longer than 3 characters each otherwise the maximum length of all date and datetime fields will have to be increased to compensate.
• The use of non-alpha characters (such as '.') in the month names should be avoided as these will be treated as possible separators and not part of the name.

Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» Possible Methods
» Design Decisions
» My Implementation - Directory Structure
» My Implementation - File Names
» My Implementation - Determine User Language
» My Implementation - Locate Language Subdirectory
» My Implementation - Load Screen Structure file
» My Implementation - Get Language Text
» My Implementation - Get Language Array
» My Implementation - Handling Dates
» My Implementation - Handling Numbers
» Conclusion
» References

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