Feature: #100187 - ICU-based date and time formatting 

See forge#100187

Description 

TYPO3 now supports rendering date and time based on formats/patterns defined by the International Components for Unicode standard (ICU).

TYPO3 previously only supported rendering of dates based on the PHP-native functions date() and strftime().

However, date() can only format dates with English texts, such as "December" as non-localized values, the C-based strftime() function works only with the locale defined in PHP and availability in the underlying operating system.

In addition, ICU-based date and time formatting is much more flexible in rendering, as it ships with default patterns for date and time (namely FULL, LONG, MEDIUM and SHORT) which are based on the given locale.

This means, that when the locale en-US is given, the short date is rendered as mm/dd/yyyy whereas de-AT uses the dd.mm.yyyy syntax automatically, without having to define a custom pattern just by using the SHORT default pattern.

In addition, the patterns can be adjusted more fine-grained, and can easily deal with time zones for output when DateTime objects are handed in.

TYPO3 also adds prepared custom patterns:

  • FULLDATE (like FULL, but only the date information)
  • FULLTIME (like FULL, but only the time information)
  • LONGDATE (like LONG, but only the date information)
  • LONGTIME (like LONG, but only the time information)
  • MEDIUMDATE (like MEDIUM, but only the date information)
  • MEDIUMTIME (like MEDIUM, but only the time information)
  • SHORTDATE (like SHORT, but only the date information)
  • SHORTTIME (like SHORT, but only the time information)

See https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/datetime/#datetime-format-syntax for more information on the patterns.

Impact 

A new stdWrap feature called formattedDate is added, and the new formatting can also be used in Fluid's <f:format.date> ViewHelper.

The locale is typically fetched from the locale of the site language (stdWrap or ViewHelper), or the backend user's language (in backend context) for the ViewHelper usages.

Examples for stdWrap:

page.10 = TEXT
page.10.value = 1998-02-20 3:00:00
# see all available options https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/datetime/#datetime-format-syntax
page.10.formattedDate = FULL
# optional, if a different locale is wanted other than the Site Language's locale
page.10.formattedDate.locale = de-DE
Copied!

will result in "Freitag, 20. Februar 1998 um 03:00:00 Koordinierte Weltzeit".

page.10 = TEXT
page.10.value = -5 days
page.10.formattedDate = FULL
page.10.formattedDate.locale = fr-FR
Copied!

will result in "jeudi 9 mars 2023 à 21:40:49 temps universel coordonné".

Examples for Fluid <f:format.date> ViewHelper:

<f:format.date pattern="dd. MMMM yyyy" locale="de-DE">{date}</f:format.date>
Copied!

will result in "20. Februar 1998".

As soon as the pattern attribute is used, the format attribute is disregarded.

Both new ViewHelper arguments are optional.