Pattern String Symbols

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.

Symbol	Meaning	Presentation	Example
G	era designator	Text	AD
y	year	Number	1996 or 96
M	month in year	Text or Number	July or Jul or 07
d	day in month	Number	10
h	hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	12
H	hour in day (0-23)	Number	0
m	minute in hour	Number	30
s	second in minute	Number	55
S	millisecond	Number	978
E	day in week	Text	Tuesday or Tue
D	day in year	Number	189
F	day of week in month	Number	2 (2nd Wed in July)
w	week in year	Number	27
W	week in month	Number	2
a	am/pm marker	Text	PM
k	hour in day (1-24)	Number	24
K	hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	0
z	time zone	Text	Pacific Standard Time or PST or GMT-08:00
Z	RFC 822 time zone (JVM 1.4 or later)	Number	-0800 (offset from GMT/UT)
'	escape for text	Delimiter
' '	single quote	Literal	'