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Date Arithmetic - VB6 Date & Time
The most important and flexible function for formatting date and time values
is the Format function. This function gives you seven different, named formats
for date and time:
-
General Date (date and time in general format; only the date if the fractional
part is 0; only the time if the integer part is 0)
-
Long Date (for example, Friday, October 17, 2008, but results vary depending
on your locale)
-
Medium Date (for example, 17-Oct-2008)
-
Short Date (for example, 10/17/2008)
-
Long Time (for example, 8:35:48)
-
Medium Time (for example, 8:35 A.M.)
-
Short Time (for example, 8:35 in a 24 hour format)
You also have a few special characters with which you can build your own custom
date and time format strings, including one- and two-digit day and month numbers,
complete or abbreviated month and weekday names, a.m/p.m. indicators, week and
quarter numbers, and so on:
' mmm/ddd = abbreviated month/weekday,
' mmmm/dddd = complete month/weekday
Print Format(Now, "mmm dd, yyyy (dddd)") ' "Aug 14, 1998 (Friday)"
' hh/mm/ss always use two digits, h/m/s use one or two digits
Print Format(Now, "hh:mm:ss") ' "20:35:48"
Print Format(Now, "h:mm AMPM") ' "8:35 P.M."
' y=day in the year, ww=week in the year, q=quarter in the year
' Note how a backslash can be used to specify literal characters.
Print Format(Now, "mm/dd/yy (\d\a\y=y \w\e\e\k=ww \q\u\a\r\t\e\r=q)")
' Displays "08/14/98 (day=226 week=33 quarter=3)"
Visual Basic 6 has introduced the new FormatDateTime function. It's far less
flexible than the standard Format function and permits only a subset of the Format
function's named formats. The only advantage of the FormatDateTime function is
that it's also supported under VBScript and so can contribute to the ease of porting
pieces of code from Visual Basic and VBA to VBScript and vice versa. Its syntax
is
result = FormatDateTime(Expression, [NamedFormat])
where NamedFormat can be one of the following intrinsic constants: 0-vbGeneralDate
(the default), 1-vbLongDate, 2-vbShortDate, 3-vbLongTime, or 4-vbShortTime. Here
are a few examples:
Print FormatDateTime(Now) ' "8/14/98 8:35:48 P.M."
Print FormatDateTime(Now, vbLongDate) ' "Saturday, August 15, 1998"
Print FormatDateTime(Now, vbShortTime) ' "20:35"
Visual Basic 6 also includes two new functions related to date formatting.
The MonthName function returns the complete or abbreviated name of a month, whereas
the WeekdayName function returns the complete or abbreviated name of a weekday.
Both are locale aware, so you can use them to list month and weekday names in
the language the operating system has been configured for:
Print MonthName(2) ' "February"
Print MonthName(2, True) ' "Feb"
Print WeekdayName(1, True) ' "Sun"
More on Date and Time in Visual Basic 6
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