Many of our partners use our platform for appointment reminders, events, and scheduling, and so need a high degree of customization in terms of sending dates. We support a wide variety of date and time formats using the DATEFORMAT variable. This variable is available when creating Flows on our platform. 


1. Using DATEFORMAT: an example


If you want to send the date 02/06/2019 as February 06, 2019 you would use @(DATEFORMAT(flow.flow_date, "%B %d, %Y")) where “flow.flow_date” would be the flow step where you are capturing the date.


Let´s take the same date, but now we want to send “Feb 06, 2019”. To do that we would use @(DATEFORMAT(flow.flow_date, "%b %d, %y")).


2. Supported DATEFORMAT formats:


Directive

Meaning

Example

Notes

%a

Weekday as locale’s abbreviated name.

Sun, Mon, …, Sat (en_US);

So, Mo, …, Sa (de_DE)

(1)

%A

Weekday as locale’s full name.

Sunday, Monday, …, Saturday (en_US);

Sonntag, Montag, …, Samstag (de_DE)

(1)

%w

Weekday as a decimal number, where 0 is Sunday and 6 is Saturday.

0, 1, …, 6

 

%d

Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number.

01, 02, …, 31

 

%b

Month as locale’s abbreviated name.

Jan, Feb, …, Dec (en_US);

Jan, Feb, …, Dez (de_DE)

(1)

%B

Month as locale’s full name.

January, February, …, December (en_US);

Januar, Februar, …, Dezember (de_DE)

(1)

%m

Month as a zero-padded decimal number.

01, 02, …, 12

 

%y

Year without century as a zero-padded decimal number.

00, 01, …, 99

 

%Y

Year with century as a decimal number.

1970, 1988, 2001, 2013

 

%H

Hour (24-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number.

00, 01, …, 23

 

%I

Hour (12-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number.

01, 02, …, 12

 

%p

Locale’s equivalent of either AM or PM.

AM, PM (en_US);

am, pm (de_DE)

(1), (2)

%M

Minute as a zero-padded decimal number.

00, 01, …, 59

 

%S

Second as a zero-padded decimal number.

00, 01, …, 59

(3)

%f

Microsecond as a decimal number, zero-padded on the left.

000000, 000001, …, 999999

(4)

%z

UTC offset in the form +HHMM or -HHMM (empty string if the the object is naive).

(empty), +0000, -0400, +1030


%Z

Time zone name (empty string if the object is naive).

(empty), UTC, EST, CST

 

%j

Day of the year as a zero-padded decimal number.

001, 002, …, 366

 

%U

Week number of the year (Sunday as the first day of the week) as a zero padded decimal number. All days in a new year preceding the first Sunday are considered to be in week 0.

00, 01, …, 53

(5)

%W

Week number of the year (Monday as the first day of the week) as a decimal number. All days in a new year preceding the first Monday are considered to be in week 0.

00, 01, …, 53

(5)

%c

Locale’s appropriate date and time representation.

Tue Aug 16 21:30:00 1988 (en_US);

Di 16 Aug 21:30:00 1988 (de_DE)

(1)

%x

Locale’s appropriate date representation.

08/16/88 (None);

08/16/1988 (en_US);

16.08.1988 (de_DE)

(1)

%X

Locale’s appropriate time representation.

21:30:00 (en_US);

21:30:00 (de_DE)

(1)

%%

A literal '%' character.

%

 


Notes:


  1. Because the format depends on the current locale, care should be taken when making assumptions about the output value. Field orderings will vary (for example, “month/day/year” versus “day/month/year”), and the output may contain Unicode characters encoded using the locale’s default encoding (for example, if the current locale is ja_JP, the default encoding could be any one of eucJP, SJIS, or utf-8; use locale.getlocale() to determine the current locale’s encoding).

  2. When used with the strptime() method, the %p directive only affects the output hour field if the %I directive is used to parse the hour.

  3. Unlike the time module, the datetime module does not support leap seconds.

  4. %f is an extension to the set of format characters in the C standard (but implemented separately in datetime objects, and therefore always available). When used with the strptime() method, the %f directive accepts from one to six digits and zero pads on the right.

  5. For a naive object, the %z and %Z format codes are replaced by empty strings. For an aware object: 


    1. %z: utcoffset() is transformed into a 5-character string of the form +HHMM or -HHMM, where HH is a 2-digit string giving the number of UTC offset hours, and MM is a 2-digit string giving the number of UTC offset minutes. For example, if utcoffset() returns timedelta(hours=-3, minutes=-30), %z is replaced with the string '-0330'.

    2. %Z: If tzname() returns None, %Z is replaced by an empty string. Otherwise, %Z is replaced by the returned value, which must be a string.

  7. When used with the strptime() method, %U and %W are only used in calculations when the day of the week and the year are specified.