A Time Picture contains the components used to define time pictures. You can use optional separators to separate the Hour, Minute and Second components.
Data must be entered according to the picture format, with an hour and minute component required. Midnight is 12:00:00 am for 12 hour clocks, and 24:00:00 for 24 hour clocks. One second after midnight is 12:00:01 am for 12 hour clocks, and 00:00:01 for 24 hour clocks.
Separators can be any other characters, and will be displayed in the relative position they occupy in the mask.
Commonly used separators are colon (:), hyphen (-), and period (.).
For 12 hour clocks, you can include the characters AM in your picture in the location you want AM or PM to appear. Use the case you want used in the display.
For a 24 hour clock, place the number 24 at the end of the picture. For a 12 hour clock, place the number 12 at the end of the picture. If you do not specify the clock type, a 24 hour clock is assumed, unless you have set the default time format to a 12 hour clock through the Options utility. Note that in procedures a time picture cannot consist of a minute component alone.
For additional information, see Time Picture Elements.