NumberFormatter::ORDINAL giving me garbage

Question

I'm trying to use the NumberFormatter class in PHP and I'm having problems with the ORDINAL format. I've tried a couple other formats without a problem. But when I use ORDINAL I just get garbage. Choosing a different locale seems to give me different garbage.

$round = new NumberFormatter("en", NumberFormatter::ORDINAL);
echo $round->format(6);

I would expect the output to be "6th" but instead I get "6áµ—Ê°".

Answer 1

That "garbage" on the end is some Unicode encoding of a superscript "th" symbol. There are special symbols for superscript letters (although they are not commonly used), and NumberFormatter is using them. The relevant rule file in ICU is http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/icu/trunk/source/data/rbnf/en.txt.