Convert en_US to to en-US

Question

Convert en_US to to en-US

1.4k views Asked by jeffjenx At 20 November 2014 at 19:55

I'm writing a PHP application that supports multiple languages.

When setting the locale in PHP, I am required to provide a value defined in, what I believe to be, RFC 1766 / ISO 639, according to the setlocale documentation.

setlocale( LC_ALL, 'en_US' );
var_dump( setlocale( LC_MESSAGES, '0' ) );
// string(5) "en_US"

When using this locale to describe the HTML lang attribute, validation fails because it is not formatted to RFC 5646. The RFC 5646 value for this language is actually en-US (note the use of a hyphen instead of an underscore).

Using this value in PHP's setlocale function, as above, results in the following output:

string(1) "C"

~~I have no idea why it is returning a value of C, but I presume it is because the locale provided was incorrectly formatted.~~ C being the original server default, which is described as ASCII (thanks to @Cheery for the reference).

So, I'm wondering what I should do about that. I could, feasibly, use PHP's str_replace function to switch - to _ before outputting the lang attribute, like so:

<?php setlocale( 'en_US' ); ?>
<!doctype html>
<html lang="<?= str_replace( '_', '-', setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, '0') ); ?>">
...

But, I'm concerned that there may be other differences between the two language specifications that could yield an unexpected problem down the road. If so, is there a preferred way to translate the language codes already in PHP, or a translation class that can be used?

Bonus question, why does my server default to value of C for the locale?

Original Q&A

There are 2 answers

Agustin Ugarte On 26 November 2014 at 15:25

You can set local language codes using "setlocale".

You can find here it's documentation as well as this and other examples

Example where they try different possible locale names for german:

<?php
/* Set locale to Dutch */
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nld_nld');

/* Output: vrijdag 22 december 1978 */
echo strftime("%A %d %B %Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, 12, 22, 1978));

/* try different possible locale names for german as of PHP 4.3.0 */
$loc_de = setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE@euro', 'de_DE', 'deu_deu');
echo "Preferred locale for german on this system is '$loc_de'";
?>

**PhoneixS** · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-03 12:50:31

You need to have in mind that setLocal accept many types of "locale" names like names and mixed things, for example in (from php documentation):

$loc_de = setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE@euro', 'de_DE', 'de', 'ge');

You have 'de_DE@euro' which isn't a valid HTML lang code.

So first, you need to ensure that is in the format lang_region before trying to convert it.

TechQA.

Convert en_US to to en-US

There are 2 answers

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