First of all: I know that I can manually create a bunch of config files with corresponding patterns for every locale; actually I try to find a workaround with using only IntlDateFormatter.
I'll try to explain with examples.
<?php
$tz = new DateTimeZone('Europe/Moscow');
$now = time();
foreach (['en_US', 'ja_JA', 'ru_RU'] as $locale) {
printf("%s:\n", $locale);
foreach ([IntlDateFormatter::MEDIUM, IntlDateFormatter::LONG] as $datetype) {
$formatter = new IntlDateFormatter($locale, $datetype, IntlDateFormatter::NONE);
printf("- %s\n", $formatter->format($now));
}
}
This produces
en_US:
- Feb 1, 2016
- February 1, 2016
ja_JA:
- 2016/02/01
- 2016年2月1日
ru_RU:
- 1 февр. 2016 г.
- 1 февраля 2016 г.
And I need
en_US:
- Feb 1
- February 1
ja_JA:
- 02/01
- 2月1日
ru_RU:
- 1 февр.
- 1 февраля
The first idea was to extract a pattern for given locale and remove any 'y' and 'Y' letters. But as you can see, there is more than just a 4-digit year: all that commas, slashes, labels (like 'г.' and '年').
PS:
Actually, what I want from an ideal IntlDateFormatter
implementation is a smart pattern, where all components are in their places, but I can configure what pattern to use for each component. Like: instead of 'd MMMM y г.'
pattern for ru_RU
formatter has a 'dmy'
pattern, and for d
component it has d
pattern, m
- MMMM
and y
- y г.
. So I could say y
component is a '' (empty string), and voila.
Also, if you are aware of any library that already does this — please, let me know.
So, currently it's impossible. I've found that intl
PHP extension simply lacks of DateTimePatternGenerator
(http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/datetime), which is exactly what I need.
The DateTimePatternGenerator class provides a way to map a request for a set of date/time fields, along with their width, to a locale-appropriate format pattern. The request is in the form of a “skeleton” which just contains pattern letters for the desired fields using the representation for the desired width. In a skeleton, anything other than a pattern letter is ignored, field order is insignificant, and there are two special additional pattern letters that may be used: 'j' requests the preferred hour-cycle type for the locale (it gets mapped to one of 'H', 'h', 'k', or 'K'); 'J' is similar but requests no AM/PM marker even if the locale’s preferred hour-cycle type is 'h' or 'K'.
For example, a skeleton of “MMMMdjmm” might result in the following format patterns for different locales:
locale | format pattern for skeleton “MMMMdjmm” | example ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ en_US "MMMM d 'at' h:mm a" April 2 at 5:00 PM es_ES "d 'de' MMMM, H:mm" 2 de abril, 17:00 ja_JP "M月d日 H:mm" 4月2日 17:00
Also, I've found that HHVM has implemented it — https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/commit/bc84daf7816e4cd268da59d535dcadfc6cf01085 . I hope one day this will be ported to PHP.
UPD: I've written a huge post on the problem — https://blog.ksimka.com/a-long-journey-to-formatting-a-date-without-a-year-internationally-with-php/