date filter outputs am / pm as a.m. / p.m.

[lewisjenkins]

{{ entry.postDate|date('a') }} is outputting a.m. but according to PHP Date it should be am (without the added periods). Same goes for {{ entry.postDate|date('A') }}.

[lewisjenkins]

Just to add, if I do <?php echo date('a'); ?> outside of Craft (but on the same server) then it outputs am which is the expected behaviour. So this appears to be something within Craft / Twig.

[brandonkelly]

Guessing this is happening for a site set to nb or nl? In those cases this is expected.

Craft overrides Twig’s |date filter with a custom one that adds support for ICU-based format strings short, medium, long, and full, plus ICU date formats (e.g. icu:y-MM-dd). And PHP date formats get converted to an ICU format first, and then output, so that the resulting format will take the current locale into account (month/weekday/AM/PM names all use the locale-specific words).

[lewisjenkins]

The site is set to en-GB. Following your comment I tried {{ entry.postDate|date('a', locale='en-US') }} and the result was am. So it looks like a.m. is the expected behaviour for en-GB which I never knew despite being British! Thanks for clarifying :)

[brandonkelly]

Ah ok, perhaps that too :) I was going off our locale data exports in src/config/locales/, but if you have the Intl extension installed it’s really just up to whatever your installed ICU database has.

It might be worth us adding a parameter to the date filter to disable the ICU conversion, if you definitely just want to go with whatever PHP’s date() method returns.