Forum OpenACS Q&A: Formatting dates / times nicely

http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/clock.htm

it takes a datetime value (in seconds) and formats it.  if you want to do the opposite and translate a datetime into seconds, use clock scan.

where fmt is one of these:
      %c          FDCC-set's appropriate date and time
                  representation.
      %q          Long date without weekday
      %Q          Long date with weekday
      %x          FDCC-set's appropriate date representation.
      %X          FDCC-set's appropriate time representation.

If you use one of these formats, it is automatically localized to the user's selected locale.

Anybody who knows what FDCC stands for is welcome to chime in.

Code that does pretty-formatting in the DB should be changed to do so in the Tcl layer.

Here's the recommended way of doing things:

db_multirow -extend { mydate_pretty } {
    select to_char(mydate, 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') as mydate_ansi,
          ...
    ...
} {
    set mydate_ansi [lc_time_system_to_conn $mydate_ansi]
    set mydate_pretty [lc_time_fmt $mydate_ansi "%x %X"]
}

... or use your desired date/time format as the second argument to lc_time_fmt.

The only date format we should ever get out of the DB is ANSI dates.

/Lars

Jade, didn't you have some other new coding standard stuff that should go into the docs?