Time and Date Formatting in Webcrossing

Webcrossing has built-in date formatting, which is identical in both WCTL and SSJS. This is date formatting not available in standard JavaScript. A time and date format is a list of time/date specifiers, mixed with literal characters such as : or @.

For example, in SSJS:

var now = new Date();
+ now.dateFormat( "H1:I2 a" );

This will produce the current time of day in Hours(one digit):Seconds(two digits) am/pm format, or, for example, 3:07 pm.

To do the same thing in WCTL:

%% set now date( dateObj ) %%
%% now.dateFormat( "H1:I2 a" ) %%

Alternatively in WCTL, if you don't care about the formatting particularly, you can just do %% date %% or %% time %% and get the default formatting settable in the Control Panel.

Here is the full list of the date formatting strings you can use.

Y2  2 character year
  Y4  4 character year
  
  M1  1 or 2 digit month
  M2  2 digit month
  MMM 3 character month, all caps
  Mmm 3 character month, leading cap
  M   full month name, leading cap
  mmm 3 character month, all lower case
  m   full month name, all lower case
  
  D1  1 or 2 digit day of month
  D2  2 digit day of month
  D3  1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th...
  
  WWW 3 character day of week, all caps
  Www 3 character day of week, leading cap
  W   full day of week, leading cap
  
  H1  1 or 2 digit hour, 12 hour clock
  H2  2 digit hour, 12 hour clock
  H3  1 or 2 digit hour, 24 hour clock
  H4  2 digit hour, 24 hour clock
  
  I1  1 or 2 digit minutes
  I2  2 digit minutes
  
  S1  1 or 2 digit seconds
  S2  2 digit seconds
  
  L1  1, 2, or 3 digit milliseconds
  L3  3 digit milliseconds
  
  A   AM/PM, upper case
  a   am/pm, lower case
  
  N   output a "-" if the date/time is negative

  toutc delta from local time to GMT/UTC, as +HHMM or -HHMM
  
  $c  escape to embed "c" into the output string

For example:

Format	Sample output
W, D2-Mmm-Y2 H4:I2:S2	Monday, 05-Mar-11 09:52:13
M D1, Y4	Jan 4, 2011
H2:I2a	03:30pm

One important difference between standard Javascript and the Webcrossing extension to the Date object is that in Webcrossing, the month is 1-based instead of 0-based. That is to say, if it's  March, Date.getMonth() returns 2 while Date.dateFormat("M1") returns 3. The dateFormat is more oriented towards producing human-readable strings.