Outputting dates in non-ASCII characters with PHP

Question

I\'m trying to output the date in Traditional Chinese.

I have the date as a Unix timestamp, ( example: \"1467244800\" ).

I am doing the following:

Answer 1

Locales not only come in different languages, but also different encodings. The default zh_TW locale will probably use some Chinese encoding, while what you want is UTF-8. Hence, use the UTF-8 version of the locale:

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'zh_TW.UTF-8');

This depends on your specific system and what locales are installed on it. Check that on the command line:

$ locale -a
...
zh_TW
zh_TW.Big5
zh_TW.UTF-8

To be more cross-platform compatible, you can try several locales:

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'zh_TW.UTF-8', 'zh_TW.utf8', 'zh_TW');