How to format a date ?

About

This how to will show you how to format a date with the pipeline format function.

You can apply it to any date variable such as:

• the today's date now
• or any page date attribute such as:
  • date_created or date_modified of a page
  • date_published (if specified, see The published date)
  • date_start or date_end of an event

Example

Today's date

Without any formatting, the date is given in the iso date format

${now}

To apply a formatting, you need to use the format function

${now | format()}

The output is a date formatted to the default format of your locale (ie country and language)

Today's date with a pattern

Today's date with a date pattern where:

• MMM is the short month description
• dd is the day number on two digits

${now | format( "MMM dd" )}

• The output:

Formatting a date content

Because a pipeline is an expression, you can even format a date written in your content.

${"2022-05-05" | format()}

• The output:

Formatting a date in an other language

• A date formatted in French with the default pattern (The markup with the locale attribute with just the region (ie country) as value)

${now | format( "", "fr" )}

• Compare it with the US date

${now | format( "", "us" )}

Date of a page

You can also print the date metadata of a page.

For instance, for the date of this article

  * ${date_created | format()}
  * ${date_modified | format()}
  * ${date_published | format()}

The output is: