Date formatting language defined by the strftime function from the Standard C Library.

This implementation in Elixir is mostly compatible with strftime. The exception is the absence of locale-depended results. All directives that imply textual result will produce English names and abbreviations.

A complete reference of the directives implemented here is given below.

Directive format

A directive is marked by the percent sign (%) followed by one character (<directive>). In addition, a few optional specifiers can be inserted in-between:

%<flag><width><modifier><directive>

Supported flags:

• - - don't pad numerical results (overrides default padding if any)
• 0 - use zeros for padding
• _ - use spaces for padding
• :, :: - used only in combination with %z; see description of %:z

          and `%::z` below

<width> is a non-negative decimal number specifying the minimum field width.

<modifier> can be E or O. These are locale-sensitive modifiers, and as such they are currently ignored by this implementation.

List of all directives

• %% - produces a single % in the output

Years and centuries

• %Y - full year number (0..9999)
• %y - the last two digits of the year number (0..99)
• %C - century number (00..99)
• %G - year number corresponding to the date's ISO week (0..9999)
• %g - year number (2 digits) corresponding to the date's ISO week (0..99)

Months

• %m - month number (1..12)
• %b - abbreviated month name (Jan..Dec, no padding)
• %h - same is %b
• %B - full month name (January..December, no padding)

Days, and days of week

• %d - day number (1..31)
• %e - same as %d, but padded with spaces ( 1..31)
• %j - ordinal day of the year (001..366)
• %u - weekday, Monday first (1..7)
• %w - weekday, Sunday first (0..6)
• %a - abbreviated weekday name (Mon..Sun, no padding)
• %A - full weekday name (Monday..Sunday, no padding)

Weeks

• %V - ISO week number (01..53)
• %W - week number of the year, Monday first (00..52)
• %U - week number of the year, Sunday first (00..52)

Time

• %H - hour of the day (00..23)
• %k - same as %H, but padded with spaces ( 0..23)
• %I - hour of the day (1..12)
• %l - same as %I, but padded with spaces ( 1..12)
• %M - minutes of the hour (00..59)
• %S - seconds of the minute (00..60)
• %f - microseconds in zero padded decimal form, i.e. 025000
• %L - milliseconds (000..999)
• %s - number of seconds since UNIX epoch
• %P - lowercase am or pm (no padding)
• %p - uppercase AM or PM (no padding)

Time zones

• %Z - time zone name, e.g. UTC (no padding)
• %z - time zone offset in the form +0230 (no padding)
• %:z - time zone offset in the form -07:30 (no padding)
• %::z - time zone offset in the form -07:30:00 (no padding)

Compound directives

• %D - same as %m/%d/%y
• %F - same as %Y-%m-%d
• %R - same as %H:%M
• %r - same as %I:%M:%S %p
• %T - same as %H:%M:%S
• %v - same as %e-%b-%Y