Translate Month-Day combinations in CakePHP

Question

I can translate an individual month or day just fine using my .po files:

echo __('December'); //becomes diciembre
echo __('Thursday'); //becomes jueves
//...etc

But, when I use a date formate like this:

 echo __(date("j F, Y"));  //becomes 20 December 2012

It doesn't translate - I assume because I have translations for each month and day in individual lines.

Normally I would just do something like this:

__(date('j')) . ' ' . __(date('F')) . ' ' . __(date('Y'));

But, in the CMS, the admin is allowed to change the date to any format they want. So, it could be "j F, Y", or "Y-m-d", or... anything else.

I thought maybe I could make a helper or something, that broke apart a date into pieces, and returns each part in a __(), but - this seems overkill. Is there an easy way to do this?

I am setting my locale in the AppController:

setlocale(LC_ALL, $currentLanguage['locale']);
Configure::write('Config.language', $currentLanguage['code2']);

Answer 1

Turns out CakePHP has a TimeHelper i18nFormat function:

$time = time();
$timestring = $this->Time->format('Y-m-d H:i:s', $time);
$this->Time->i18nFormat($timestring, "%A %e %B %Y");

Create a file "LC_TIME" (no extension) and put it in your /Locale/ara/ folder (or replace 'ara' with whatever 3-char language code you want)

Copy the contents of CakePHP's time_test LC_TIME file and put it into yours (then save of course).

Then change it's contents to whatever language you want (I believe that example is in Spanish).

That's it!

Notes:

More details about the LC_TIME file here: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.aix.files%2Fdoc%2Faixfiles%2FLC_TIME.htm

Answer 2

The CakeTime class (and thus the TimeHelper) uses the 'cake' domain for day and month names translation. So put those translations in cake.po file instead of default.po