[pmwiki-users] page variable with setlocale and utf-8

[Hans Bracker]

In blogsimple I assign the month name and long year to  a pagevariable
{$BlogMonth} via a function, including this:
$bmonth = strftime("%B %Y",$tdate);

How can the pagevariable deliver utf-8 encoded localised names, like "März"?
If the wiki encodes via scripts/xlpage-utf-8.php, and I add for instance
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'ge');
to the blogsimple.php script, I get German month names from the
variable, but they don't encode in utf-8, so March appears as M?rz
instead of März.
If I add a simple
echo 'a';
for instance to the blogsimple.php, then March appears correctly as März.
I don't understand why this will make a difference, and obviously i
don't want to use echo, as it produces error messages at the page top.
I just mention it because it caused a correct name.

setlocale(LC_TIME, 'ge.utf-8'); did not work.

The XLPage settings seem to have no relevance.

Any help is much appreciated.

Hans