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PHP Manual

The Locale class

(PHP 5 >= 5.3.0, PECL intl >= 1.0.0)

Introduction

A "Locale" is an identifier used to get language, culture, or regionally-specific behavior from an API. PHP locales are organized and identified the same way that the CLDR locales used by ICU (and many vendors of Unix-like operating systems, the Mac, Java, and so forth) use. Locales are identified using RFC 4646 language tags (which use hyphen, not underscore) in addition to the more traditional underscore-using identifiers. Unless otherwise noted the functions in this class are tolerant of both formats.

Examples of identifiers include:

  • en-US (English, United States)
  • zh-Hant-TW (Chinese, Traditional Script, Taiwan)
  • fr-CA, fr-FR (French for Canada and France respectively)

The Locale class (and related procedural functions) are used to interact with locale identifiers--to verify that an ID is well-formed, valid, etc. The extensions used by CLDR in UAX #35 (and inherited by ICU) are valid and used wherever they would be in ICU normally.

Locales cannot be instantiated as objects. All of the functions/methods provided are static.

The null or empty string obtains the "root" locale. The "root" locale is equivalent to "en_US_POSIX" in CLDR. Language tags (and thus locale identifiers) are case insensitive. There exists a canonicalization function to make case match the specification.

Class synopsis

Locale {
/* Methods */
public static string acceptFromHttp ( string $header )
public static string canonicalize ( string $locale )
public static string composeLocale ( array $subtags )
public static bool filterMatches ( string $langtag , string $locale [, bool $canonicalize = false ] )
public static array getAllVariants ( string $locale )
public static string getDefault ( void )
public static string getDisplayLanguage ( string $locale [, string $in_locale ] )
public static string getDisplayName ( string $locale [, string $in_locale ] )
public static string getDisplayRegion ( string $locale [, string $in_locale ] )
public static string getDisplayScript ( string $locale [, string $in_locale ] )
public static string getDisplayVariant ( string $locale [, string $in_locale ] )
public static array getKeywords ( string $locale )
public static string getPrimaryLanguage ( string $locale )
public static string getRegion ( string $locale )
public static string getScript ( string $locale )
public static string lookup ( array $langtag , string $locale [, bool $canonicalize = false [, string $default ]] )
public static array parseLocale ( string $locale )
public static bool setDefault ( string $locale )
}

Predefined Constants

Locale::DEFAULT_LOCALE (null)
Used as locale parameter with the methods of the various locale affected classes, such as NumberFormatter. This constant would make the methods to use default locale.

These constants describe the choice of the locale for getLocalte method of different classes.

Locale::ACTUAL_LOCALE (string)
This is locale the data actually comes from.
Locale::VALID_LOCALE (string)
This is the most specific locale supported by ICU.

These constants define how the Locales are parsed or composed. They should be used as keys in the argument array to locale_compose() and are returned from locale_parse() as keys of the returned associative array.

Locale::LANG_TAG (string)
Language subtag
Locale::EXTLANG_TAG (string)
Extended language subtag
Locale::SCRIPT_TAG (string)
Script subtag
Locale::REGION_TAG (string)
Region subtag
Locale::VARIANT_TAG (string)
Variant subtag
Locale::GRANDFATHERED_LANG_TAG (string)
Grandfathered Language subtag
Locale::PRIVATE_TAG (string)
Private subtag

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