Date function output in a local language [duplicate]

I am trying to output dates in the Italian format using date() as follows:

<?php 
    setlocale(LC_ALL, 'it_IT');
    echo date("D d M Y", $row['eventtime']); 
?>

However, it is still coming out in the English format. What else could I do? Is there something wrong?

The solution has to be script specific and not server-wide.

Solution 1:

date() is not locale-aware. You should use strftime() and its format specifiers to output locale-aware dates (from the date() PHP manual):

To format dates in other languages, you should use the setlocale() and strftime() functions instead of date().

Regarding Anti Veeranna's comment: he is absolutely right, since you have to be very careful with setting locales as they are sometimes not limited to the current script scope. The best way would be:

$oldLocale = setlocale(LC_TIME, 'it_IT');
echo utf8_encode( strftime("%a %d %b %Y", $row['eventtime']) );
setlocale(LC_TIME, $oldLocale);

Solution 2:

I found that setlocale isn't reliable, as it is set per process, not per thread (the manual mentions this). This means other running scripts can change the locale at any time. A solution is using IntlDateFormatter from the intl php extension.

$fmt = new \IntlDateFormatter('it_IT', NULL, NULL);
$fmt->setPattern('d MMMM yyyy HH:mm'); 
// See: http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/datetime for pattern syntax
echo $fmt->format(new \DateTime()); 

If it doesn't work you might need to:

• Install intl php extension (ubuntu example): sudo apt-get install php5-intl

• Install the locale you want to use: sudo locale-gen it_IT