Topic: wxastronomy.php $marchequinox get_localdate() language

[jachen]

There is something obscure with rendering  the 'localdate' in wxastronomy.php. There are the two functions get_utcdate() anf get_localdate() involved which I am not able to completely understand when it comes to convert the WD-Dates.

In my case the problem appears to be the german Umlat (ä or ä) which renders the correct marchequinox for utc but on the other hand renders 01/01/1970 01:00 for the get_localdate($marchequinox) - Function. I can see this phenomenum on many Sites using wxastronomy.php and its just left as it is.

My workaround was to change the get_localdate($marchequinox) to get_utcdate($marcheequinox) in order not to render the 01/01/1970 01:00.

However I am not happy with this. Particularly when trying to json_encode($marchequinox) for usage in another program php quits.
Well, could easily forget this variable since all the other variables encode perfectly. But it teases me.

Any hint around the mentioned behavior would be appreciated.

Have a nice day everywhere.
     

[Jasiu]

In your Settings.php, is "monthNames" set with the months matching what would get passed in the string to get_localdate()? That needs to be the case because that function attempts to convert the month names to English to call strtotime().

If you provide a pointer to the site, some of us can take a look directly to see what might be going on.

[jachen]

Thank you for paying attention. You should be able to reach the Site by using the green button on my profile in the left pane here or directly to the wxastronomy.php page https://meteo.widen-online.ch/wxastronomy.php.

Code: [Select]

$SITE['monthNames'] = array(
'Januar','Februar','März','April','Mai','Juni',
'Juli','August','September','Oktober','November','Dezember'
);
I had to change the code of the function invocation from  get_localdate($marchequinox) to get_utcdate($marchequinox) in order to avoid a date of 01/012/1970 01:00.
 

Code: [Select]

<?php if ($SITE['latitude'] >= 0) { // Use Northern Hemisphere dates with images?>
      <td align="center">
  <?php echo get_localdate($marchequinox); ?><br/>
  <small><?php echo get_utcdate($marchequinox); ?></small></td>
I think this issue is not trivial.

[Jasiu]

Have a look at

   view-source:https://meteo.widen-online.ch/wxastronomy.php

Search for "after utcstr" in the HTML comments. All of the translations work except for March, so something is amiss in the conversion code in get_localdate.

Code: [Select]

// input dates are assumed to be in English only
 if (isset($SITE['monthNames'])) {
    // convert TO English for strtotime()
    echo "<!-- before utcstr='$utcstr' -->\n";
foreach ($EnglishMonths as $i => $monthEN) {
   $utcstr = preg_replace('| '.$SITE['monthNames'][$i].' |i'," $monthEN ",$utcstr);
} 
    echo "<!-- after utcstr='$utcstr' -->\n";
  }

I'm going to be offline for most of the day but Ken or someone can probably figure this out fairly quickly.

[saratogaWX]

My suspicion is that the ä  in 'März' is in UTF-8 and not in ISO-8859-1/ANSI in the

Code: [Select]

$SITE['monthNames'] = array(
'Januar','Februar','März','April','Mai','Juni',
'Juli','August','September','Oktober','November','Dezember'
); in Settings.php.

The März has to be translated to March in order for the strtotime() to be able to handle the month name.. since it can't translate it by lookup, the strtotime() returns a 1970 date for the local date.  Try editing your Settings.php and convert it to ISO-8859-1/ANSI and retype the ä in März and upload your Settings.php again.

[jachen]

Thank you very much Ken.

As you mentioned it appeared that Settings.php were UTF-8 on Server. I then changed locally with the VSC-Editor to ISO-8859-1 retyped the ä and uploaded again. But there was no improvement.

Could it be that everything gets converted to UTF-8 again serverside? How to overcome that?

[jachen]

Wxastronomy uses $marchequinox as argument for get_locale() function.

$marchequinox (in testtags.php locally) is continuously uploaded (written to testtags.php on server) from my Client running WD and set to Language German/Swiss. So there is no chance (at least for me) to achieve the desired Output.

If I was to change the PC to US-English I might run into a ton of resettings on the serverside. Probably not worthwhile.

Cheers jachen

[jachen]

It took me a few hours to learn a bit of php to reengineer stuff in wxastronomy.php.

Finally the change of 2 lines did the job:

Code: [Select]

<?php $iso88591 = utf8_encode($marchequinox);?>
    <?php echo get_localdate($iso88591);?><br/>
Thanks to everybody for the kind hints and have a good time.