Date expression in VariableDevice

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Hey, i’m using a Variable Device to get the current date:

{
  "variables": [
    {
      "name": "Heute",
      "expression": "\"{date(\"DD.MM.YYYY\")} \"",
      "type": "string"
    }
  ],
  "xAttributeOptions": [],
  "id": "datum",
  "name": "Datum",
  "class": "VariablesDevice"
}

What are the possible options for formatting date? I’d like to get the name of the day (Mon / Montag / Monday, would be ok…). I tried “E” and “EE”, but that didn’t work…
Any solution for this?

Thanks a lot
Greetings

For the date formatting the date-format-lite package is used. See supported syntax below. You get the day of week by using the DDD designator. Make sure you have German locale settings set on your Raspi if you wish to have localized time information.

• Y - A two digit representation of a year without leading zeros. Examples: 99 or 3
• YY - A two digit representation of a year. Examples: 99 or 03
• YYYY - A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits. Examples: 1999 or 2003
• M - Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros. 1 through 12
• MM - Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros. 01 through 12
• MMM - A short textual representation of a month, three letters. Jan through Dec
• MMMM - A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March. January through December
• D - Day of the month without leading zeros. 1 to 31
• DD - Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros. 01 to 31
• DDD - A textual representation of a day, three letters. Mon through Sun
• DDDD - A full textual representation of the day of the week. Sunday through Saturday
• H - 12-hour format of an hour without leading zeros. 1 through 12
• HH - 12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros. 01 through 12
• h - 24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros. 0 through 23
• hh - 24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros. 00 through 23
• m - Minutes without leading zeros. 0 through 59
• mm - Minutes with leading zeros. 00 to 59
• s - Seconds without leading zeros. 0 through 59
• ss - Seconds with leading zeros. 00 to 59
• S - Milliseconds without leading zeros. 0 through 999
• SS - Milliseconds with leading zeros. 000 to 999
• u - Milliseconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)
• U - Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)
• A - Ante meridiem and Post meridiem. AM or PM
• "text" - text, quotes should be escaped, eg ‘“a \“quoted text\”” YYYY’

Time zone designators

• Z - Time offsets from UTC in the form ±hh[:mm] Examples: +02, +02:30
• ZZ - Time offsets from UTC in the form ±hh[mm] Examples: +02, +0230
• ZZZ - Time offsets from UTC in the form ±hh:mm Examples: +02:00, +02:30
• ZZZZ - Time offsets from UTC in the form ±hhmm Examples: +0200, +0230

ISO-8601

• w - Day of the week. 1 (for Monday) through 7 (for Sunday)
• W - Week number of year, first week is the week with 4 January in it
• o - ISO-8601 year number. This has the same value as YYYY,
  except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead

@mwittig Thank you! The “DDD” did the trick!

@sirhc Great! I have updated my post accordingly

Hi,
is it possible to change the language of the output? I think it is realized by the date-format-lite package.

My raspberry is set to german and also pimatic. But I do not know how to change the language of the output of the variable device with the expression

"{date("DDDD")} "

In the shell I get it to german by using

date +"%A"

@Fabian said in Date expression in VariableDevice:

is it possible to change the language of the output? I think it is realized by the date-format-lite package.

Unfortunately, no. The date-format-lite package does not support localization, but it supports customization and this way
it is possible to setup a language mapping which could be defined as part of pimatic’s localization. I have created a ticket for that, but
it’ll take some time before I can look into this.

https://github.com/pimatic/pimatic/issues/1069

EDIT: I have added a simple proof-of-concept example code to the ticket which has revealed two minor issues with date-format-lite.

@mwittig thank you in advance!

By now I’m using a ShellSensor with the command:

date +%A