VBScript: More Fun with the Date Functions

In our first article on VBScript date functions, way back in January, we covered CDate, Date, DateAdd, and DateDiff. In this article, we'll be picking up where we left off. We still have a lot of ground to cover; who knew dates were so important? So let's get started.

Contributed by James Payne
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March 25, 2008

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Function Name	What It Does
CDate	Used to change the date and time expression to the variant subtype Date
Date	Used to return the current date, based on your system date
DateAdd	Used to return a date in which a time interval you specified has been added
DateDiff	Used to return the difference between two dates
DatePart	Used to return a specific part of a date
DateSerial	Used to return the date for a year you specify: year, month, and day
DateValue	Used to return a date
Day	Used to return a day of the month; Returns a number between 1 and 31
FormatDateTime	Used to return an expression. Formats it as a date or as a time
Hour	Used to return the hour. Returns a number between 0 and 23.
IsDate	Used to check if a value can be converted to a date. Returns a boolean value.
Minute	Used to return the minutes of an hour. Value range is between 0 and 59.
Month	Returns the month. Value returned is a number ranging from 1-12.
MonthName	Returns the name of a month you specifiy.
Now	Returns the date and time based on your system's date and time.
Second	Returns the seconds of the minute. A value between 0 and 59.
Time	Used to return the system time.
Timer	Used to return the amount of seconds since 12:00 am.
TimeSerial	Used to return the time for a specified hour, minute, and second.
TimeValue	Used to return a time
Weekday	Used to return a day of the week. Value is a number between 1 and 7
WeekDayName	Used to return the name of a day in the week
Year	Used to return a year. Value is a number representing the year. (Duh)

Partying with the DatePart Function

DatePart allows you to extract a part of a date. Note that like most date functions, you can use the following parameters:

yyyy: Used for year
q: Used for quarter
m: Used for month
y: Used for day of the year
d: Used for Day
w: Used for Weekday
ww: Used for week of year
h: Used for hour
n: used for minute
s: Used for second

Here are some samples:

Parsing out the Month, Day, and Year from the Current Date:

<html>

<body>

document.write("Today's date is: ") & Date & "<br /><br />"

document.write("This is month number ") & (DatePart("m",Date))

document.write("<br />This is day number ") & (DatePart("d",Date))

document.write("<br />The year is ") & (DatePart("yyyy",Date))

</script>

</body>

</html>

This code results in the text:

Today's date is: 11/28/2007

This is month number 11
This is day number 28
The year is 2007

Parsing out the Month, Day, and Year from a Specified Date:

<html>

<body>

document.write("My next birthday is 04/22/2007") & "<br /><br />"

document.write("This is month number ") & (DatePart("m","04/22/2007"))

document.write("<br />This is day number ") & (DatePart("d","04/22/2007"))

document.write("<br />The year is ") & (DatePart("yyyy","04/22/2007"))

</script>

</body>

</html>

As you can see, the only difference is the replacement of the Date function with our specified date.

Serial Dating

The DateSerial...well it's hard to explain exactly what it does, so I am just going to show you. The syntax is DateSerial(year,month,day). Here we go:

<html>

<body>

document.write("I was born on: ")

document.write(DateSerial(1977,4,22) & "<br /")

</script>

</body>

</html>

Which results in:

I was born on: 4/22/1977

You can also do this:

<html>

<body>

document.write("I was born on: ")

document.write(DateSerial(2007-30,12-8,4+18) & "<br /")

</script>

</body>

</html>

This also results in:

I was born on: 4/22/1977

Valuing Your Date

The DateValue returns a value that is a Date type. Here it is in action:

<html>

<body>

document.write(DateValue("28-Nov-07") & "<br />")

document.write(DateValue("28-Nov"))

</script>

</body>

</html>

The result:

11/28/2007

You will note that if you leave the year portion out of the statement, it will use the systems year.

What Day is it Anyway?

If we want to know which day of the month it is (represented by a value ranging from 1-31), we can use the Day() function, like so:

<html>

<body>

document.write("Today's date is: ") & Date & ("<br />")

document.write("The day of the month is ") & Day(Date)

</script>

</body>

</html>

This results in the printout:

Today's date is: 12/28/2008
The day of the month is 28

Formatting the Date/Time with the...(drum roll please) FormatDateTime() Function

If you want to specify how your date/time looks, one way to do so is with the FormatDateTime() function. There are five different formats you can use, starting with 0 and working through to number 4. Here they are in code:

<html>

<body>