PHP day of week numeric to day of week text

Question

This may be really easy but I can't find a PHP function to do this...

OK so

$dow_numeric = date('w'); 

gives the numeric day of the week 0-6 for Sunday to Saturday.

And

$dow_text = date('D'); 

gives the 3 letter abbreviation for the text day of the week (Sun, Mon, etc.)

Is there a function or easy way to use $dow_numeric to get $dow_text? If I have '0' as $dow_numeric, how can I make $dow_text = 'Sun'? Yes a switch statement could do the job, but I’m looking for a more elegant solution.

Answer 1

Bit of a hack, but:

$dow_text = date('D', strtotime("Sunday +{$dow_numeric} days")); 

Answer 2

It's not popular, but there's actually a function jddayofweek for this in PHP. You can call it with the second parameter as 1 to get full gregorian week day name or 2 for the abbreviated name.

e.g. jddayofweek(2, 2); #returns Wed 

Note that for this function, numbers start at Monday. So Monday=0, Tuesday=1, ...