Many of the date services require you to specify pattern strings describing the data's current format and/or the format to which you want it converted. For services that require a pattern string, use the symbols in the following table to describe the format of your data. For example, to describe a date in the January 15, 1999 format, you would use the pattern string MMMM dd, yyyy. To describe the format 01/15/99, you would use the pattern string MM/dd/yy. For more information about these pattern string symbols, see the Oracle Java API documentation for the SimpleDateFormat class.