Salesforce Date & Datetime Formats

Salesforce Date & Datetime Formats
Salesforce uses the Java datetime formats, found here, for its format strings used with datetimes. The format() method only applies to datetimes; if you want to format a date, you must first convert it to a datetime using newInstance():

date testDate = system.today();
datetime dt = dt.newInstance(testDate, time.newInstance(0, 0, 0, 0));


The baseline datetime formats are as follows:

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

Some interesting datetime formats are found in this table:

Input	Format	Output
07/05/2009	MM/dd/yyyy	07/05/2009
07/05/2009	M/d/yy	7/5/09
07/05/2009	dd/MM//yyyy	05/07/2009
07/05/2009	MMMM d, yyyy	July 5, 2009
07/05/2009	EEEE	Sunday