dateFormat returning the wrong year

Ignition
1

Hey all,

I hope your holidays have been going well!

Just looking for a quick sanity check and maybe some pointers regarding an expression that I'm using on a label component in perspective.

The specific function is:

dateFormat(NOW(), "YYYY")

I'm having a very confusing time as it is currently returning 2025. This post was created at around 11:30AM on Dec. 30th 2024 local time. I've checked PC time settings, local PC time settings, and pretty much everything else I can think of anyways.

For reference, now() by itself seems to return the correct date and time, not 2025.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

2

Use lower case.

(Look closer at the pattern definitions.)

1 Like
3

See dateFormat | Ignition User Manual

which references
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

which gives,

Letter Date or Time Component Presentation Examples
G Era designator Text AD
y Year Year 1996; 96
M Month in year Month July; Jul; 07
w Week in year Number 27
W Week in month Number 2
D Day in year Number 189
d Day in month Number 10
F Day of week in month Number 2
E Day in week Text Tuesday; Tue
a Am/pm marker Text PM
H Hour in day (0-23) Number 0
k Hour in day (1-24) Number 24
K Hour in am/pm (0-11) Number 0
h Hour in am/pm (1-12) Number 12
m Minute in hour Number 30
s Second in minute Number 55
S Millisecond Number 978
z Time zone General time zone Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z Time zone RFC 822 time zone -0800
1 Like
4

That old table doesn't show the difference between upper and lower case y. This one is more current:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

1 Like
5

Submitted to docs@inductiveautomation.com.

2 Likes
6

Thanks for the replies Phil and Transistor, lowercase did solve my problem.

7

Just to round this off a bit, YYYY returns the "week year", or the year that a week belongs to. (As far as I can make out) Week 1 contains the 1st January and since that's a Wednesday in 2025 the preceeding Monday and Tuesday are also in Week 1 of 2025. So (for my locale, Ireland), I get,
dateFormat(toDate("2024-12-29 08:00:00"), "YYYY") → 2024
dateFormat(toDate("2024-12-30 08:00:00"), "YYYY") → 2025
dateFormat(toDate("2024-12-31 08:00:00"), "YYYY") → 2025
dateFormat(toDate("2025-01-01 08:00:00"), "YYYY") → 2025

YYYY year
YYYY year347×468 55.9 KB

Figure 1. Week 1 of 2025 contains the last two days of 2024, so the Week Year is 2025 for those two dates.

There's some discussion over on StackOverflow which goes into some detail - but who has time?