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Time Display Syntax

This page describes the syntax for the time display option in your Profile. You can customize the way times are displayed on the page. We basically use the syntax implemented by django, but we added two extra options to nicely display relative dates to today.

Basic Syntax

This is taken directly from the django docs:

Character Description Example output
a 'a.m.' or 'p.m.' (Note that this is slightly different than PHP's output, because this includes periods to match Associated Press style.) 'a.m.'
A 'AM' or 'PM'. 'AM'
b Month, textual, 3 letters, lowercase. 'jan'
d Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros. '01' to '31'
D Day of the week, textual, 3 letters. 'Fri'
f Time, in 12-hour hours and minutes, with minutes left off if they're zero. Proprietary extension. '1', '1:30'
F Month, textual, long. 'January'
g Hour, 12-hour format without leading zeros. '1' to '12'
G Hour, 24-hour format without leading zeros. '0' to '23'
h Hour, 12-hour format. '01' to '12'
H Hour, 24-hour format. '00' to '23'
i Minutes. '00' to '59'
j Day of the month without leading zeros. '1' to '31'
l Day of the week, textual, long. 'Friday'
L Boolean for whether it's a leap year. True or False
m Month, 2 digits with leading zeros. '01' to '12'
M Month, textual, 3 letters. 'Jan'
n Month without leading zeros. '1' to '12'
N Month abbreviation in Associated Press style. Proprietary extension. 'Jan.', 'Feb.', 'March', 'May'
O Difference to Greenwich time in hours. '+0200'
P Time, in 12-hour hours, minutes and 'a.m.'/'p.m.', with minutes left off if they're zero and the special-case strings 'midnight' and 'noon' if appropriate. Proprietary extension. '1 a.m.', '1:30 p.m.', 'midnight', 'noon', '12:30 p.m.'
r RFC 2822 formatted date. 'Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200'
s Seconds, 2 digits with leading zeros. '00' to '59'
S English ordinal suffix for day of the month, 2 characters. 'st', 'nd', 'rd' or 'th'
t Number of days in the given month. 28 to 31
T Time zone of this machine. 'EST', 'MDT'
w Day of the week, digits without leading zeros. '0' (Sunday) to '6' (Saturday)
W ISO-8601 week number of year, with weeks starting on Monday. 1, 53
y Year, 2 digits. '99'
Y Year, 4 digits. '1999'
z Day of the year. 0 to 365
Z Time zone offset in seconds. The offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east of UTC is always positive. -43200 to 43200

Note that any of this characters can be escaped with a trailing backslash: \r

Extensions

We added the two extensions

Name Syntax Description Sample Output
Natural Day %ND(alternative) This will put in 'today','yesterday','tomorrow' if fit, otherwise will use the formatting 'alternative' %ND(j.m.y) will yield: 'tomorrow' or '12.2.08'
Natural Year %NY(formatting) This will put in the year with the formatting, or if the year is the current year an empty string %NY(.y) will yield: '' if today is in the same year or '.08' if it is in another

Examples

This is the formatting I use, note that I escaped 'Uhr', so that it shows up as literal chars

%ND(j.m.y), H:i \U\h\r

This formatting might yield '12.3.08, 12:03 Uhr' or 'yesterday, 13:09 Uhr'.

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