Strftime() errors

[mrcycling]

Summary

What is happening with MODX? I am suddenly getting getting errors as below:

Deprecated: Function strftime() is deprecated in /my/server/directory/xdom/core/src/Revolution/Filters/modOutputFilter.php on line 459

The pages are generated OK and by shutting off the PHP error messages I can avoid having the served page start with ten error messages as above. BUT I prefer to figure out why.

I have the most current version on MODX installed 3.2.0pl, am running PHP8.3 on a shared server.

[halftrainedharry]

The PHP function strftime has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 8.1.0, but is still used in some places in MODX. In your case it looks like you use the output modifier strftime or date.
The code still works OK, but generates these deprecation messages (if the server is configured to output them).

See also this older topic:

What's happening with the strftime() and date() output modifiers?

Both of these modifiers call strftime() which is deprecated in PHP 8.1 and will be removed in PHP 9. If they’re rewritten to use date(), they’ll break existing code, since the formatting tokens are different. They’ll also lose the ability to translate things like day and month names into languages other than English. They could use the new DateTime object, but it also gives only English output (and the format strings would still be wrong). The only alternative that I know of that will handle …

[mrcycling]

I don’t use strftime(), that I am aware of. The only MODX date manipulations I use are:

Copyright year in footer:
[[!+nowdate:default=now:strtotime:date=%Y]]

Format departure dates for tours:
[[+tourdate:strtotime:date=%e %b %Y]]

I have no extras or add-ons, just the basic MODX install.

[halftrainedharry]

In both those examples you use the date output modifier.
The date output modifier is identical to the strftime output modifier and still uses the PHP function strftime():

core/src/Revolution/Filters/modOutputFilter.php

[mrcycling]

So I guess the smart move is to finalize the date format in the snippet before sending it to the appropriate chunk and not bother with MODX’s date functions.

[halftrainedharry]

Well there are different ways to deal with this issue. You could just wait (and ignore the deprecation warnings). The output modifiers will eventually get changed. (Here’s a draft proposal for the change.)
Or you could create a custom output modifier to replace the built-in ones (as for example described here):

Emo extra causing blank page together with archivist and german umlaut

The built-in output modifier date uses the PHP function strftime as well. As the function strftime is deprecated (see also this thread), it’s probably a good idea to write a custom output modifier (similar to the one from this thread.) For example a snippet “mydate” like this: <?php // snippet call [[+publishedon:mydate=`dd. MMMM y`]] $input = !empty($input) ? strtotime($input) : ''; $pattern = !empty($options) ? $options : 'dd. MM. y'; $formatter = new IntlDateFormatter('de-DE', NULL, NULL)…

[bobray]

I have converted strftime() calls to use the IntlDateFormatter class. It requires enabling the Intl extension for PHP, but I think that’s usually enabled by default since the deprecation of strftime().

The documentation on it is not great, but it’s relatively easy once you get used to it, and I suspect that it will be faster than using the output filter. I have a MODX Blog post on it that’s scheduled for publication in April.

[mrcycling]

Thanks for the suggestions. I think, for our uses, updating the existing snippets to output date in the correct format is probably easier than customizing MODX.

Unlike most, we use MODX as a static page generator, not a live page server. So speed is not a big factor, since we build the pages, then upload them to Netlify for public access.