| Doc. Number | Article Title | Effective Date | Version |
| FHC-XX | Formatting {DATE} Tags | April 17, 2024 | 0.4 |
This article was developed to describe the process to format {DATE} tags. This article was organized into the following topics:
- Overview
- How to Format the {DATE} Tag
- Populating future dates
- Populating future dates relating to other tags
- Date codes
- Business date tag
Overview
Date tags (Examples: {DATE}, {SIGNDATE}, {DOB}, etc.) populate information in the system default format which is Month (abbreviated) Day, and Year (Example: Aug 02, 2022). Usually, this format is fine, but there may be cases where this format, or even the date needs to be modified.
Common instances where the date format may be requested to be different:
- The client requests a specific format for a template (document/email/note/SMS/etc.)
- The client requests a future date, based on a defined date, to populate instead (Example: 3 Days in the Future from Today)
- An outside system that receives data from an account requires that a Webhook send its dates in a specific format (Example: YYYY-MM-DD)
How to Format the {DATE} Tag
While the date codes used will depend on what you’re trying to do, formatting a date tag will start the same way.
For example, to change the format of my date to 'Day - Month (full spelling) - Year'.
Place the tag on the document template as {DATE:d - F - Y||today} to do this. The date would be "17 - April - 2024" (assuming today is April 17th, 2024).
The basic format being used is {DATE:**Date Code**||**date**}.
Populating future dates
You can also format date tags to make future dates populate. For example, if you want the date to populate 10 days from today.
Place the tag on the document template as {DATE:m d, Y||Today + 10 days} to do this. The date would be "Apr 27, 2024" (assuming today is April 17th, 2024).
Populating future dates related to other tags
You can also replace "Today" with another date tag. For example, if you have a tag labeled "Example Date", you can include this as part of the DATE tag so you can populate the information formatted as you desire.
Let's assume you have a custom field, "Example Date," and it has a value of 1/12/2024 but you want it to populate as "January 1st, 2024", add the tag as {DATE:F jS, Y||{CF:Example Date}}. You are replacing "Today" as used in earlier examples for the tag {CF:Example Date}, this will then populate the value of Example Date as "January 1st, 2024".
Date codes
Below is a list of the available codes and an explanation of what they will populate. You will use these as part of the tag to format the populated information.
- d - The day of the month (from 01 to 31)
- D - A textual representation of a day (three letters)
- j - The day of the month without leading zeros (1 to 31)
- l (lowercase 'L') - A full textual representation of a day
- N - The ISO-8601 numeric representation of a day (1 for Monday, 7 for Sunday)
- S - The English ordinal suffix for a day of the month (2 characters st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j)
- w - A numeric representation of the day (0 for Sunday, 6 for Saturday)
- z - The day of the year (from 0 through 365)
- W - The ISO-8601 week number of the year (weeks starting on Monday)
- F - A full textual representation of a month (January through December)
- m - A numeric representation of a month (from 01 to 12)
- M - A short textual representation of a month (three letters)
- n - A numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros (1 to 12)
- t - The number of days in the given month
- L - Whether it's a leap year (1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise)
- o - The ISO-8601 year number
- Y - A four-digit representation of a year
- y - A two-digit representation of a year
- a - Lowercase am or pm
- A - Uppercase AM or PM
- B - Swatch Internet time (000 to 999)
- g - 12-hour format of an hour (1 to 12)
- G - 24-hour format of an hour (0 to 23)
- h - 12-hour format of an hour (01 to 12)
- H - 24-hour format of an hour (00 to 23)
- i - Minutes with leading zeros (00 to 59)
- s - Seconds, with leading zeros (00 to 59)
- u - Microseconds (added in PHP 5.2.2)
- e - The timezone identifier (Examples: UTC, GMT, Atlantic/Azores)
- I (capital i) - Whether the date is in daylight savings time (1 if Daylight Savings Time, 0 otherwise)
- O - Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours (Example: +0100)
- P - Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours:minutes (added in PHP 5.1.3)
- T - Timezone abbreviations (Examples: EST, MDT)
- Z - Timezone offset in seconds. The offset for timezones west of UTC is negative (-43200 to 50400)
- c - The ISO-8601 date (e.g. 2013-05-05T16:34:42+00:00)
- r - The RFC 2822 formatted date (e.g. Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:01:05 +0200)
- U - The seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)
Business date tag
It may be necessary to populate a future date in business days; omitting weekends and federal holidays from the calculation. A unique tag was developed to be used in these cases.
For example, if you include a cancellation form in your contract that your client can sign and submit to cancel service within 10 business days of the Signing Date of your agreement, you would use the tag as displayed below to populate the date 10 business days in advance.
For example, assume the signing date is 4/17/2024 using the tag as {BDATE:M d, Y || 10 ||{DATE}} will populate the date 10 business days from that date which would be "Apr 29, 2024" (adhering to the formatted codes we used within the tag itself "M d, Y").
For additional information, please visit php.net
Article Version History:
| Version | Effective Date | Description |
| Basic | 12/26/2016 | Initial Release |
| 0.1 | 09/01/2022 | Minor Updates |
| 0.2 | 10/24/2022 | Added new header; Minor Updates |
| 0.3 | 04/30/2023 | Added version control footer; updated sample dates to reflect the current decade. |
| 0.4 | 04/17/2024 | Updated examples provided to be up to date; minor grammatical updates. |