Question

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.

Answer 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);