As far as I can tell, the PHP documentation doesn't mention any Windows alternative.

So there's no way to account for this particular nuance of Windows?

From what I gather from the web site, this software is designed more for a Linux environment than a Windows one. Nevertheless, I've found it to work fairly well on Windows, with one small exception.

"Note: Not all conversion specifiers may be supported by your C library, in which case they will not ...