Format Date To HH:MM AMPM Format in ASP

Category:

Dates and Math

Type:

Snippets

Difficulty:

Intermediate

Author:

Anonymous

Version Compatibility: ASP, Visual Basic Script

More information:

Pre-.NET ASP ("classic ASP") supports the function FormatDateTime() but not Format(), which is available in VB 5 or 6. Compared with Format(), ASP's FormatDateTime() is very limited. If you want to display the time in the form HH:MM:SS AMPM, then you'd use FormatDateTime(date,3). However if you just want to display the time in HH:MM AMPM format, you have to parse the returned string from FormatDateTime(date,3) to get rid of the :SS portion. This is dumb. So I made an ASP snippet that creates a time string in HH:MM AMPM format. It's easily converted to a function but I will let you do that.

Instructions: Copy the declarations and code below and paste directly into your VB project.

Declarations:
Dim hrval, thetime Dim somedateval Dim sAMPM

Code:

' Another annoying thing about ASP is that it doesn't support
' Iif().  This too is beyond dumb but there it is.  Anyway, it
' is very easy to make your own Iif function, even in ASP.
' The code snippet below uses the following function to
' handle the in-line functional "If" comparisons in it; just add
' the function to your ASP page and you're bobbers:

Function Iif(a, b, c)
 If a Then
  Iif = b
 Else
  Iif = c
 End if
End Function

' ---------------
' So now, here's the snippet I promised you, with some 
' commentary (of course):
' ---------------

' hour() returns 0 if the hour is midnight.  Normal humans see
' '0' as an hour value and think there is something wrong.
' (Programmers, not being quite normal, have no problem with
' this, but our end-users do.  So we must accommodate.)
If hour(somedateval) = 0 Then
  hrval = "12"
Else
  ' hour() returns the hour in 0-23 format, so we have to
  ' convert anything above 12 back to the 12-hour standard.
  ' We do this by subtracting 12 if the returned value for
  ' hour() is greater than 12.
  hrval = Iif( hour(somedateval)>12, hour(somedateval)-12, hour(somedateval))
End If

' hour() returning 0 means it's past midnight but before noon,
' so it's in the AM time of the day.  At 12 or greater, we are
' always in the PM time of the day.
sAMPM = Iif(hour(somedateval)<12, "AM", "PM")

' minute() will return a single digit if the minute of the
' current hour is under 10 minutes.  However a time value
' of 10:2 PM confuses normal people (and programmers, too).
' So we need to test the length of the returned minute() value
' and it is is 1, we have to prepend a '0' to get back something 
' people want to look at, such as "10:02 PM"
thetime = hrval & ":" & Iif(Len(minute(somedateval))=1, "0" & _
          minute(somedateval), minute(somedateval)) & " " & _
          sAMPM

' At this point, thetime holds the time portion of somedateval
' in HH:MM AMPM format.  All that work just for this.  Like I
' said, ASP is dumb. :)