Formatting date/time by locale

The formatting of date and time varies region to region. As a classic example, consider the year 2016, month April, day 15 and a time in the evening. The format preferred by denizens of the United States would be 7:23 PM, 4/15/2016, whereas in China you would most likely see 2016-04-15 19:23. As mentioned with number and currency formatting, it would also be important to display (and parse) dates in a format acceptable to your web visitors.

How to do it...

1. First of all, we need to modify Application\I18n\Locale, adding statements to use date formatting classes:

   use IntlCalendar;
   use IntlDateFormatter;

2. Next, we add a property to represent an IntlDateFormatter instance, as well as a series of predefined constants:

   const DATE_TYPE_FULL   = IntlDateFormatter::FULL;
   const DATE_TYPE_LONG   = IntlDateFormatter::LONG;
   const DATE_TYPE_MEDIUM = IntlDateFormatter::MEDIUM;
   const DATE_TYPE_SHORT  = IntlDateFormatter::SHORT;
   
   const ERROR_UNABLE_TO_PARSE = 'ERROR: Unable to parse...