PHP 8.1: strftime() is deprecated

Question

When upgrading to PHP 8.1, I got an error regarding "strftime". How do I correct the code to correctly display the full month name in any language?

 $date = strftime("%e %B %Y", strtotime('2010-01-08'))

Answer 1

To my dear and late strftime()... I found a way to adapt with IntlDateFormatter::formatObject and here is the link for the references to the schemas:

https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/datetime/#date-field-symbol-table

... For those who want to format the date more precisely

// "date_default_timezone_set" may be required by your server
date_default_timezone_set( 'Europe/Paris' );

// make a DateTime object 
// the "now" parameter is for get the current date, 
// but that work with a date recived from a database 
// ex. replace "now" by '2022-04-04 05:05:05'
$dateTimeObj = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone('Europe/Paris'));

// format the date according to your preferences
// the 3 params are [ DateTime object, ICU date scheme, string locale ]
$dateFormatted = 
IntlDateFormatter::formatObject( 
  $dateTimeObj, 
  'eee d MMMM y à HH:mm', 
  'fr' 
);

// test :
echo ucwords($dateFormatted);

// output : Jeu. 7 Avril 2022 à 04:56

Answer 2

I've chosen to use php81_bc/strftime composer package as a replacement.

Here the documentation.

Pay attention that the output could be different from native strftime 'cause php81_bc/strftime uses a different library for locale aware formatting (ICU).

Note that output can be slightly different between libc sprintf and this function as it is using ICU.