Lorna Mitchell shares a quick code snippet she's worked up to make handling local-sensitive dates in PHP a bit easier (via the strftime function).

I needed dates like "Donderdag 23 Oktober", and I was sure PHP should know how to do this without me creating arrays for days of the week and months of the year. With some help from my friend (thanks Derick) I discovered that there is a date function in PHP that takes into account the locale of the script, called strftime.

Her code snippet shows how to set the correct local time (in her case, nl_NL with a UTF-8 encoding) and how to return a formatted string based on formatting characters (much like printf/sprintf).