Format Date and Time

Modified on Sat, 20 Jan at 12:11 PM

Formatting date and time will be useful for anyone who has customers in multiple nations and regions. Because the date & time format is not the same in every place. You can change the format of the date & time to your needs.

Follow the steps below to learn how to format the date and time for your convenience:

Step 1: Go to the flow that you want to edit. Get the date (this is one way of getting date and time to be formatted)

Step 2: Among many options on the builder choose the “Action” option and select “Format Date/Date & Time” on the list.

Step 3: Now select the option on the builder to,

Select the date custom field that contains the date you want to format.

On the next field enter the format of the date and time you need to change from the default (For example, if you want to display the date and time as “23-01-2022; 02-00 a.m” then you need to enter the format field (without quotation) as “d-m-Y; h-i a”. Refer the table below to know more about the parameters).

Then, create a new custom field or select the existing one to store the changed date & time format on the “Save the formatted date to” field.

In addition, you can choose the time zone of this formatted date & time for the page (or) the user’s time zone.

You can download a flow template that uses the same format and features here.

Table explaining the parameters of the date & time formats:

Character	Description	Values
Day	—	—
d	Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros	01 to 31
D	A textual representation of a day, three letters	Mon through Sun
j	Day of the month without leading zeros	1 to 31
l (lowercase ‘L’)	A full textual representation of the day of the week	Sunday through Saturday
N	ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week (added in PHP 5.1.0)	1 (for Monday) through 7 (for Sunday)
S	English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters	st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j
w	Numeric representation of the day of the week	0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday)
z	The day of the year (starting from 0)	0 through 365
Week	—	—
W	ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on Monday	Example: 42 (the 42nd week in the year)
Month	—	—
F	A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March	January through December
m	Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros	01 through 12
M	A short textual representation of a month, three letters	Jan through Dec
n	Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros	1 through 12
t	Number of days in the given month	28 through 31
Year	—	—
L	Whether it’s a leap year	1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise.
o	ISO-8601 week-numbering year. This has the same value as Y, except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (added in PHP 5.1.0)	Examples: 1999 or 2003
Y	A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits	Examples: 1999 or 2003
y	A two-digit representation of a year	Examples: 99 or 03
Time	—	—
a	Lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem	am or pm
A	Uppercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem	AM or PM
g	12-hour format of an hour without leading zeros	1 through 12
G	24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros	0 through 23
h	12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros	01 through 12
H	24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros	00 through 23
i	Minutes with leading zeros	00 to 59
s	Seconds with leading zeros	00 through 59
U	Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT). This format is very important because it allows you to get the date as total of seconds. With seconds you can do a lot of maths. For example a quiz bot would save the start date a user starts the quiz and also save the date the user finishes the quiz. The bot would calculate the total minutes the user takes to finish the quiz with ({{stop}} – {{start}})/60.