setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_GB.UTF8') not working on windows

Question

Why does setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_GB.UTF8'); return false on Windows Server 2003 R2 - Zend CE PHP 5.3.5 ?

Function in question: setlocale.

Answer 1

From the PHP Manual:

The return value of setlocale() depends on the system that PHP is running. It returns exactly what the system setlocale function returns.

So in your case it returns false because the system returns false. It is likely that the locale you're using is not available on your system.

A list of setlocale strings supported by Windows is available here. For British English you want eng, english-uk, or uk. Windows doesn't support multi-byte character sets like UTF-8 though; you will probably end up with Windows-1252.

Answer 2

I would like to add that the problem of Windows not supporting utf-8 can be improved with something like this:

$str=strftime('%a'); //for example
if(!mb_check_encoding($str,'utf-8')) $str=utf8_encode($str);