On the SitePoint PHP blog Younes Rafie has continued his series about the PHP "Intl" extension for use in internationalizing an application. in this second part of the series he moves away from just strings and looks at using it for currencies and numbers.

The first part of this series was an introduction of the PHP Intl extension and of how to localize your application’s messages. In this part, we’re going to learn about localizing numbers, dates, calendars, and similar complex data.

The post is broken down into a few different sections, each with their own examples:

• Localizing Decimals
• Localizing Currencies
• Timezones
• Calendars

The "Intl" extension makes these operations relatively simple with plenty of built-in objects and methods to help with the translations between the formats. You can find out more about this extension in the PHP manual.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from Younes Rafie that wants to help demystify internationalization functionality in your PHP application...with the help from a handy extension, the intl extension.

Most applications perform locale aware operations like working with texts, dates, timezones, etc. The PHP Intl extension provides a good API for accessing the widely known ICU library’s functions.

He walks you through the installation of the extension if you don't have it already for both PHP 5 and PHP 7 (the second requires adding a custom apt-get repository). With that all installed and configured he starts in on the code to output a simple message with formatting using the MessageFormat functionality. His first example is in English but he also shows the difference between that and Arabic and Bengali and they're related output. He looks at a few other topics including pluralization, "choices" (different messages for different values) and more complex cases. He ends the post briefly looking at message parsing - extracting a value according to the provided format.

Following up on his previous post about date/time handling and localization, Simon Holywell has posted an update with information about using the "Intl" extension for PHP to get it working with the more powerful PHP DateTime handling.

I wrote about localising dates (and other data) in a recent blog post, but unfortunately there were some shortcomings where time zones were concerned. As I alluded to in that post there is a way around this via the Intl extension that exposes a simple API to format DateTime instances. Thankfully this follow up post will be quite short as the setup is very simple for those of you on Ubuntu/Debian you can use the repositories.

He includes the commands you'll need to install the extension (via apt-get), compile it via the "pecl" command and update your php.ini file to enable it. He also includes some code examples showing how to use the IntlDateFormatter handling to work with dates, formats and calendars.

Rob Allen has posted a quick guide to help you get PHP and MySQL set up on Yosemite, the latest version of Apple's OSX operating system (just released last week).

t's that time again; Apple has shipped a new version of OS X, 10.10 Yosemite. Apple ships PHP 5.5.14 with Yosemite and this is how to set it up from a clean install. However, if you don't want to use the built-in PHP or want to use version 5.6, then these are some alternatives [including the Liip binary package, Homebrew or Zend Server 7.x).

He opts for the Homebrew method, installing it first then getting into the PHP and MySQL packages. This is all done from the command-line, so you'll need to be comfortable there. He includes the commands needed to install PHP, MySQL and Apache along with all configuration changes to make them work together. He also shows how to install Xdebug, PEAR, Composer and the Mcrypt & Intl extensions if needed.

Nicolas Grekas has shared another tool that he's pulled out of his "Patchwork" framework to make it a stand-alone tool: the Patchwork-UTF8 helper that provides matching functions to those PHP already has for regular strings, but a little smarter to work with UTF8 correctly.

The PatchworkUtf8 class implements the quasi complete set of string functions that need UTF-8 grapheme clusters awareness. These functions are all static methods of the PatchworkUtf8 class. The best way to use them is to add a use PatchworkUtf8 as u; at the beginning of your files, then when UTF-8 awareness is required, prefix by u:: when calling them.

In the README for the tool he talks about the functions included in the current release that match PHP's string functions as well as some additional methods like "isUtf8", "bestFit" and "strtocasefold". It relies on the mbstring, iconv and intl extensions being installed, and if they aren't, it falls back to other functionality (list of those methods included).

Christian Weiske has posted about his experience at this year's TestFest in Belin (as hosted by the Berlin PHP User Group).

I spent the last weekend (may 09/10) on the PHP Testfest Berlin, organized by Till for the Berlin PHP Usergroup. Coming from Leipzig, I don't really know who of the other 8 people were from the user group and who not.

He mentions issues the group faced (OS X being difficult, PHP from CVS not compiling), the intro to testing and their first area of choice - gettext (which they got up to 98.8% coverage!). The second and third efforts were some work done on the intl and sockets extensions.