You might think that formatting dates can become tricky if you require a specific format. However, now, you should not be worried about that since in this article, you will be shown how to set a date in almost any format.
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How Are Dates Stored In The Database?
Before to talk about formats, we need to know how dates are stored in the database:
- All Date fields are saved in HTML5 format: yyyy-mm-dd. For example, this variable: {{ date_1 }} will have this format by default: 2021-05-03.
- The submission datetime is saved as unix timestamp. For example, this {{ created_at }} will have this format: 1620070060.
Date Formatting
To format a date we need to use the “date” filter. The “date” filter gives us complete control of the format. With this filter we can specify the template of the format we want. For example:
Input:
{{ created_at | date: "%m/%d/%Y" }}
Output:
05/05/2021
or
Input:
{{ created_at | date: "%d %B %Y"}}
Output:
05 May 2021
There are many placeholders we can use for date formatting.
| Placeholder | Format | Example |
|---|---|---|
| %a | Abbreviated weekday | Sun |
| %A | Full weekday name | Sunday |
| %b | Abbreviated month name | Jan |
| %B | Full month name | January |
| %c | Preferred local date and time representation | Fri Jan 29 11:16:09 2021 |
| %d | Day of the month, zero-padded | 05 |
| %-d | Day of the month | 5 |
| %D | Formats the date | 29/01/21 |
| %e | Day of the month | 3 |
| %F | Returns the date in ISO 8601 format | 2021-01-29 |
| %H | Hour of the day, 24-hour clock | 07 |
| %I | Hour of the day, 12-hour clock | 04 |
| %j | Day of the year | 017 |
| %k | Hour of the day, 24-hour clock | 7 |
| %m | Month of the year | 04 |
| %M | Minute of the hour | 09 |
| %p | Meridian indicator uppercase | AM |
| %P | Meridian indicator lowercase | pm |
| %r | 12-hour time | 01:31:43 PM |
| %R | 24-hour time | 18:09 |
| %T | 24-hour time with seconds | 18:09:13 |
| %s | Number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1452355261 |
| %S | Second of the minute | 05 |
| %U | Week number of the current year, starting with the first Sunday as the first day of the first week | 03 |
| %W | Week number of the current year, starting with the first Monday as the first day of the first week | 09 |
| %w | Day of the week. Sunday is 0 | 4 |
| %x | Preferred representation for the date | 05/11/15 |
| %X | Preferred representation for the time | 17:15:31 |
| %y | Year without a century | 21 |
| %Y | Year with a century | 2021 |
| %Z | Time zone name | PST |
| %% | Literal % character | % |
That’s everything you need to know about date formats in Easy Forms! You might not think it, but there are a lot of places where you can specify and take advantage of date formats, like Email notifications, PDF documents, SMS notifications and much more.