Date and Time Formats

Silk Central offers user-defined date and time format settings. Each Silk Central user can change their user settings, which include options for displaying custom date formats in the form of long or short date formats. For additional information, see Editing User Accounts.

Silk Central presents lists of predefined date and time formats from which users may choose. Silk Central administrators can populate these lists with customized formats.

Pattern Definition

Date and time formats are specified by date and time pattern strings. Within date and time pattern strings, unquoted letters from "A" to "Z" and from "a" to "z" are interpreted as pattern letters representing the components of a date or time string. Text can be quoted using single quotes (') to avoid interpretation. "''" represents a single quote. All other characters are not interpreted; they are simply copied into the output string during formatting or matched against the input string during parsing.

The following pattern letters are defined. All other characters from "A" to "Z" and from "a" to "z" are reserved:

Letter	Date or Time Component	Presentation	Examples
G	Era designator	Text	AD
y	Year	Year	1996; 96
M	Month in year	Month	July; Jul; 07
w	Week in year	Number	27
W	Week in month	Number	2
D	Day in year	Number	189
d	Day in month	Number	10
F	Day of week in month	Number	2
E	Day in week	Text	Tuesday; Tue
a	Am/pm marker	Text	PM
H	Hour in day (0-23)	Number	0
k	Hour in day (1-24)	Number	24
K	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	0
h	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	12
m	Minute in hour	Number	30
s	Second in minute	Number	55
S	Millisecond	Number	978
z	Time zone	General time zone	Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z	Time zone	RFC 822 time zone	-0800

Pattern letters are usually repeated, as their number determines the exact presentation.

The following list explains the items in the Presentation column in the table above:

Item: Description
Text: For formatting, when the number of pattern letters is 4 or more, the full form is used; otherwise an abbreviated form is used, when available. For parsing, both forms are accepted, independent of the number of pattern letters.
Number: For formatting, the number of pattern letters is the minimum number of digits, and shorter numbers are zero-padded to this amount. For parsing, the number of pattern letters is ignored unless it is needed to separate two adjacent fields.
Year: For formatting, when the number of pattern letters is 2, the year is truncated to 2 digits; otherwise it is interpreted as a Number.
Month: When the number of pattern letters is 3 or more, the month is interpreted as Text; otherwise, it is interpreted as a Number.
General time zone: Time zones are interpreted as Text when they have names. When the number of pattern letters is less than 4, the time zone abbreviation is displayed, for example PST. When the number of pattern letters is 4 or more, the full name is displayed, for example Pacific Standard Time.
RFC 822 time zone: The RFC 822 4-digit time zone format is used, for example -0800.

Examples

The following examples show how date and time patterns are interpreted in the U.S. The given date and time are 2001-07-04 12:08:56 local time, Pacific Standard Time zone.

Date and Time Pattern	Result
"yyyy.MM.dd G 'at' HH:mm:ss z"	2001.07.04 AD at 12:08:56 PDT
"EEE, MMM d, ''yy"	Wed, Jul 4, '01
"h:mm a"	12:08 PM
"hh 'o''clock' a, zzzz"	12 o'clock PM, Pacific Daylight Time
"K:mm a, z"	0:08 PM, PDT
"yyyyy.MMMMM.dd GGG hh:mm aaa"	02001.July.04 AD 12:08 PM
"EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z"	Wed, 4 Jul 2001 12:08:56 -0700
"yyMMddHHmmssZ"	010704120856-0700