Convert French date string to English date for comparison

Question

I'm running a multi-lingual WordPress site and I need to compare a meta value from a custom post type to the current date.

In English, it's fairly straight forward as I compared the user-entered start_date with the system time like so:

$postStartDate = strtotime(get_field('start_date'));
$currDate = strtotime(date('F j, Y'));

if ($postStartDate > $currDate):
  // Show the post
endif;

I can't use the built-in Published date from WordPress because my client sets up posts far in advance and they should be live until the meta start_date is past.

When I try and run something similar with French, however, it fails and that's because strtotime() expects English. Fair. So, I read a bit about setlocale() and strftime() and ended up trying things like this:

$frenchDate = strftime("%d %b %Y", strtotime(get_field('start_date')));

Of course, this also fails because strtotime() cannot understand 'Janvier' versus 'January', etc. so it's a non-starter right away. strftime() just spits out Jan 1, 1970 in this case.

This isn't a French server environment, merely a bilingual site.

What is the best way to compare a French date string to the current system date?

Answer 1

The best solution I could come up with when the overall site architecture can't be changed was to create an associate array to map French strings back into English for strtotime() to understand:

var monthMap = {
  'janvier' => 'january',
  ...
}

Lowercase your strings then take the French month and replace it with substr_replace() to create an English date.

A little hacky? Yes. But in the absence of any other answers, it works (so long as all French months are spelled properly by the inputting user!)