Use esc_attr() to print month name in French

Question

I am working on a PHP code in which I want to display month name in French.

 <?php 
 if (false !== strpos($translated_tz['diff'], '-')) {
            $ts = date_sub($altered_timestamp, date_interval_create_from_date_string($translated_tz['diff']));
 } else {
            $ts = date_add($altered_timestamp, date_interval_create_from_date_string($translated_tz['diff']));
 }
 ?>
 <?php if (ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == 'fr') {    

 <?php echo esc_attr(date_format($ts, 'j F ')) . '<span>' . esc_attr(date_format($ts, 'H:i')) . '</span>'; ?>  // Line A

 <?php } ?>

Code at Line A displays the following (in which month name is in English):

 20 November 03:56

Problem Statement:

I am wondering what changes I should make in the PHP code above so that it displays month name in French.

Answer 1

Here is my solution, which has been tested and works:

// Timestamp to format (defaults to current time)
$timestamp = time();

// Set language code
$dateformat = new IntlDateFormatter(
    'fr_FR', // Use valid Locale format
    IntlDateFormatter::LONG, IntlDateFormatter::NONE
);

// Set date format
$dateformat->setPattern('MMMM');

// Echo (and capitalize) formatted timestamp
echo ucfirst( $dateformat->format( $timestamp ) );

It seems that many valid locales can be found here: https://gist.github.com/jacobbubu/1836273