Wendy, do you sleep sometimes?!? You’re on so many front it sure looks like you don’t...
Anyway, nice to know you’re looking into it !
Don’t go the complicated way though if it can be avoided then be lazy
So, where do we stand on this issue? One thing to consider if we’re going to take the approach doing our own thing rather than using setlocale() is month names.
Another problem
Be carefull - setting a locale which uses commas instead of dots in numbers may cause a mysql db not to understand the query:
<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL,"pl");
$price = 1234 / 100; // now the price looks like 12,34
$query = mysql_query("SELECT Id FROM table WHERE price=’".$price."’");
?>
Even if there is a price 12.34 - nothing will be found
Do you guys think implementing our own locale will be much better?
All we need to do is to let each language file define the currency code, coma or dot, and bla bla bla. MODx will use this as the output and input. I’ll need to research this further, because it seems to me that the current setlocale functionality is not as mature as the one provided by ASP .Net. Is there any changes in PHP5 for this capability?
I agree. I would think that we would want to store all relevant data (decimal point character, month names, etc.) in the language files. Then there could be some core functions like $modx->formatDate() to format dates and times and $modx->formatNumber() that would format them using the formatting values from the language file (or default to standard English values). The formatDate() function should probably accept a UNIX timestamp and a formatting string just like PHP’s strftime() function. These functions could be wrapped in snippets for those who wanted to use them sporadically throughout their site without having every date/time or number converted.
If we want to implement a good multi lingual support for date and currency format, I think it’s better to have a set of standard to store date time, currency, and etc. Everytime this thing being outputed to the screen, there is always a function to be used to format this date into the right format. With this we are not being limited with some of the limitation in setLocale.
I have ask for this few days ago. rtrash (if I don’t mistake) is ok to do this. To format date with internationnalisation you can use the snippet FormatDate while waiting a core function.
Then there could be some core functions like $modx->formatDate() to format dates
To avoid SQL problems, simply use this instead:
Another problem
Be carefull - setting a locale which uses commas instead of dots in numbers may cause a mysql db not to understand the query:
<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL,"pl");
$price = 1234 / 100; // now the price looks like 12,34
$query = mysql_query("SELECT Id FROM table WHERE price=’".$price."’");
?>
Even if there is a price 12.34 - nothing will be found
setlocale(LC_TIME,"pl.UTF-8");
