Retrieving Day Names in PHP

Question

I need to display to user a list of localized day names (like 'Monday', 'Tuesday', ...) in a form. I know ho to get day name of any date. But is there a particular and fail-proof way to get all day names in an array.

Edit: I could add names of days to my translation file but that is hard to maintain.

Answer 1

Using strftime() in combination with setlocale() is an option.

However you should be aware that on threaded php installs, setlocale() can behave unexpected, since locale information is maintained per process, not per thread. Therefor it is important to call setlocale() every time before each call to strftime() to guarantee it uses the correct locale.

Also, for Windows systems, you need to use somewhat unusual strings for the $locale parameter for setlocale().

See the docs for more information on both of these issues.

Something like this should work:

// define the locales for setlocale() for which we need the daynames
$locales = array(
  'en_EN',
  'de_DE',
  'nl_NL'
  // etc...
);

// be aware that setlocale() needs different values on Windows machines
// see the docs on setlocale() for more information
$locales = array(
  'english',
  'german',
  'dutch'
  // etc...
);

// let's remember the current local setting
$oldLocale = setlocale( LC_TIME, '0' );

// initialize out result array
$localizedWeekdays = array();

// loop each locale
foreach( $locales as $locale )
{
    // create sub result array for this locale 
    $localizedWeekdays[ $locale ] = array();

    // 7 days in a week
    for( $i = 0; $i < 7; $i++ )
    {
        // set the locale on each iteration again
        setlocale( LC_TIME, $locale );

        // combine strftime() with the nifty strtotime()
        $localizedWeekdays[ $locale ][] = strftime( '%A', strtotime( 'next Monday +' . $i . ' days' ) );

        // reset the locale for other threads, as a courtesy
        setlocale( LC_TIME, $oldLocale );
    }
}

// there is your result in a multi-dimensional array
var_dump( $localizedWeekdays );

Answer 2

The "usual" way is to start with a given last day and count up a day on each iteration.

for ($i = 0; $i < 7; $i++) {
  $weekDayNames[] = strftime("%a", strtotime("last sunday +$i day"));
}