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## Date and time formatting characters

Various date and time formatting routines accept a format string to format the date and or time. The following characters can be used to control the date and time formatting:

c
  Formats date using shortdateformat and formats time using longtimeformat if the time is not zero.
f
  Same as c, but adds the time even if it is zero.
d
  day of month
dd
  day of month (leading zero)
ddd
  day of week (abbreviation)
dddd
  day of week (full)
ddddd
  shortdateformat
dddddd
  longdateformat
m
  month or minutes if preceded by h or hh specifiers.
mm
  month or minutes if preceded by h or hh specifiers, with leading zero.
mmm
  month (abbreviation)
mmmm
  month (full)
y
  year (2 digits)
yy
  year (two digits)
yyyy
  year (with century)
h
  hour
hh
  hour (leading zero)
n
  minute
nn
  minute (leading zero)
s
  second
ss
  second (leading zero)
t
  shorttimeformat
tt
  longtimeformat
am/pm
  use 12 hour clock and display am and pm accordingly
a/p
  use 12 hour clock and display a and p accordingly
/
  insert date separator
:
  insert time separator
"xx"
  literal text
'xx'
  literal text
z
  milliseconds
zzz
  milliseconds(leading zero)
[h]
  hours including the hours of the full days (i.e. can be > 24).
[hh]
  hours with leading zero, including the hours of the full days (i.e. can be > 24)
[n]
  minutes including the minutes of the full hours and days
[nn]
  minutes with leading zero, including the minutes of the full hours and days
[s]
  seconds including the seconds of the full minutes, hours and days.
[ss]
  seconds with leading zero, including the seconds of the full minutes, hours and days.

The forms in square brackets are only allowed if the fdoInterval option is included in the Options argument of FormatDateTime.

The date and time separators are taken from the DefaultFormatSettings record, unless a TFormatSettings record is passed to the FormatDateTime function.

Note that to include any of the above characters literally in the result string, they must be enclosed in double quotes.

## See also

DefaultFormatSettings |  | Storage for default settings
TFormatSettings |  | Record with all the strings that determine formatting
FormatDateTime |  | Return a string representation of a TDateTime value with a given format.
TFormatDateTimeOption |  | Additional options for FormatDateTime