截断Wordpress上的日期对象

Question

When my website shows a snippet of a blog post through any widget, it displays the featured image, the title, the first characters of the text itself and the date the post was made.

Inside Wordpress' content.php, it shows the date using the_time(), like this:

<div class="date-box">
     <div class="day"><?php the_time('d'); ?></div>
     <div class="month"><?php the_time('M'); ?></div>
</div>

The parameter 'M' passed in the function the_time() is supposed to give PHP the month written with only 3 characters (January would be JAN, February would be FEB and so on). In my native language (which is portuguese) it gets the months, obviously, in portuguese: January is Janeiro, February is Fevereiro... which doesn't matter for the_time('M'), it truncates it the same way.

My problem is that the month May is Maio in portuguese, a 4-letter month. Upon passing it to PHP, for some obscure reason, it doesn't get truncated. It keeps it Maio, which obviously prejudices my layout. I'm not a PHP developer, but I did a little research and tried a workaround inside the content.php, but it doesn't work:

<div class="month">
<?php
    $t = the_time('M');
    if(strlen($t) > 3){
       echo mb_strimwidth($t, 0, 3);
    }else{
       echo $t;
    };
?></div>

It might even be syntax issues, because I really don't know PHP, but it seems that I might need it to solve this problem. Am I going the right way here? I appreciate any help you give me!

TL;DR: I need to truncate a 4-letter date into a 3-letter one and pass it back to HTML.

Answer 1

Wordpress' the_*() functions all echo their output directly and don't return anything, so you can't assign the value to a variable. You're looking for get_the_time().

The rest of your code looks like it should work just fine.