setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_GB.UTF8') not working on windows

php windows utf-8 setlocale
Marcin picture Marcin · Feb 28, 2012 · Viewed 12.7k times · Source

Why does setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_GB.UTF8'); return false on Windows Server 2003 R2 - Zend CE PHP 5.3.5 ?

Function in question: setlocale.

Answer

spencercw picture spencercw · Feb 28, 2012

From the PHP Manual:

The return value of setlocale() depends on the system that PHP is running. It returns exactly what the system setlocale function returns.

So in your case it returns false because the system returns false. It is likely that the locale you're using is not available on your system.

A list of setlocale strings supported by Windows is available here. For British English you want eng, english-uk, or uk. Windows doesn't support multi-byte character sets like UTF-8 though; you will probably end up with Windows-1252.

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