Date and Time

In a lot of scripts you need a quick way to format dates and times.

NOTE: all scripts on this page assume US-English localization (time/date/currency formatting). If your PC has another time format, you'll have to adjust accordingly.

date /t gives output in a painful format like Tue 10/16/2007  ... the below munges that into a sort-able ISO-ish date in format 2007-10-16. NOTE that this uses the single-% style appropriate to interactive cmd sessions; for batchfiles, use double %% as seen in the other scripts on this page.

time /t isn't so bad, outputting as 05:53 PM. But it can be nice to have a 24-hour time format, like 17:53 ... the script below does that.

You may be wondering about line #10. If it's 9:02 PM, the time command returns 09:02 PM. The problem with this is that we end up with "09" as the %hours% variable. We have to strip out the leading zero, because if we do not, the set /a statement in line 11 will think '09' is an octal number and refuse to properly add 12 + 09(octal). So I use the for statement in line 10 to  tokenize the variable, using zero as a delimiter, thus removing the leading zero.

Also, notice the setlocal and endlocal statements at line 2 and line 15. These keep all of our variables local. Once the script ends, the %hours%, %minutes%, and all other variables will be flushed. They basically disappear after the script completes.

If the above script were saved as 24time.cmd, it would echo something like:

C:\>24time 22:15 C:\>

We can easily put date and time together as a single script that would produce the current date/time as a string like 2007-10-16 17:53 ... line 3 is added, and line 15 is changed slightly, to make this happen.

1. @echo off
2. setlocal
3. for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%a in ('date /t') do set ISODATE=%%d-%%b-%%c
4. for /f "tokens=1-3 delims=: " %%a in ('time /t') do (
5.  set hours=%%a
6.  set minutes=%%b
7.  set ampm=%%c
8. ) 
9. if {%ampm%}=={AM} if {%hours%}=={12} set hours=00
10. if {%ampm%}=={PM} (
11.  for /f "delims=0 tokens=*" %%a in ("%hours%") do set hours=%%a
12.  set /a hours+= 12
13. )
14. if {%hours%}=={24} set hours=00
15. echo %ISODATE% %hours%:%minutes%
16. endlocal

Here's what the output of the above would look like, if it were saved as isodate.cmd

C:\>isodate 2007-11-26 22:15  C:\>

Here's a similar parser for vbscript, written as a function:

1. Function DateTimeString 'build ISO-like timestamp string
2. 'string should be in format YYYYMMDD@HHMM
3. 'and yes I do not know what happens if you run this on a non-US localized system
4. 'the if-then sequences are just to add a leading zero to month, day, hour, minute if it is < 10
5. Dim oNow, sMonth, sDay, sHour, SMinute
6. oNow=Now
7. If Len(Month(oNow)) < 2 Then
8.         sMonth = 0 & Cstr(Month(oNow))
9. Else
10.         sMonth = Cstr(Month(oNow))
11. End If
12. If Len(Day(oNow)) < 2 Then
13.         sDay = 0 & Cstr(Day(oNow))
14. Else
15.         sDay = Cstr(Day(oNow))
16. End If
17. If Len(Hour(oNow)) < 2 Then
18.  sHour = 0 & Cstr(Hour(oNow))
19. Else
20.         sHour = Cstr(Hour(oNow))
21. End If
22. If Len(Minute(oNow)) < 2 Then
23.         sMinute = 0 & Cstr(Minute(oNow))
24. Else
25.  sMinute = Cstr(Minute(oNow))
26. End If
27. DateTimeString=Year(oNow) & sMonth & sDay & "@" & sHour & sMinute
28. End Function

If you were to Wscript.Echo DateTimeString, the result would be something like: 20080101@0501. This is the result for January 1, 2008 at 5:01 AM.