Date and Time Pattern Strings¶

Virtual DataPort uses the date and time Java patterns to specify date and time formats. In these patterns, the letters of the first column represent parts of a date.

In the table above, different values are used to indicate the arrangement of reserved characters. The specific output format depends on the number of times the different elements are repeated in each position:

• Text: use 4 or more characters to specify complete form; less than 4 characters to use the abbreviated form. For instance, if a date pattern specifies EEEE in the day of the week position, it indicates that day of the week should be shown using the complete form (e.g. “Monday”) instead of the abbreviated form (e.g. “Mon”).

• Number: it always uses the minimum number of digits possible. 0s are added to the left of the shortest numbers if required. The year is a special case: if the number of “y” is 2, the year is shortened to 2 digits.

• Text & Number: 3 or more characters to represent it as text; otherwise a number is used. For instance, if a date pattern specifies MMM in the month position, it indicates that months should be shown using the text name (e.g. “Jul”). If the pattern specifies MM, the month will be shown as a number. In a date format the characters that are not found in the ranges ['a'..'z'] or ['A'..'Z'] are considered constants, i.e. characters such as ':', '.', ' ', '#' and '@' appear in the resulting date, although they are not in inverted commas in the format pattern.