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This is probably the most useless piece of information, but I accidentally discovered that the hours (h) and seconds (s) masks work in ColdFusion's DateFormat() method. Yesterday, I was trying to format a time stamp but absent mindedly used the DateFormat() instead of the TimeFormat() method. To my surprise, it actually worked (at least partially). Running this code several times:
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... gives me:
08 28
08 31
08 35
08 40
I am running this a 8:07 AM and as you can see, even though we are using ColdFusion's DateFormat() method, the hours comes out correctly (8) and the seconds are incrementing as refresh the page.
This is very strange to me. Applying a mask must take processing time. I wonder why ColdFusion would take the effort to apply any masks that were not supposed to be used in the DateFormat() function.
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This is definitely not covered in the docs. The only changes I see is that in MX they added full, long, medium, and short aliases.
Posted by Raymond Camden on Jul 12, 2007 at 8:28 AM
It's probably just a side-effect of the underlying algorithm. I can't imagine that this is useful in any way. Minutes don't work because the (m) maps to months in DateFormat(). And, TT for AM/PM doesn't do anything - it just comes back as TT in the resultant formatted string. If TT worked, I could maybe imagine using hTT as part of a DateFormat() call... but, oh well.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jul 12, 2007 at 8:37 AM
It does seem like it would make more sense to just combine the two into DateTimeFormat() I get so annoyed with this line of code:
#DateFormat(now(), "m/dd/yyyy)# #TimeFormat(now(), "hh:mm:ss tt")#
Posted by Jeremy French on Jul 12, 2007 at 8:47 AM
@Jeremy,
Exactly. I am sure Ray will tell you that that UDF is up on CFLib.org. I also wrote one a while back as well:
http://www.bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:717.view
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jul 12, 2007 at 8:54 AM
A group of jellyfish is called a "smack"
That is a more useless piece of information.
Posted by Jamie on Jul 12, 2007 at 9:18 AM
Ha ha. Now would that be a "smack of jellyfish" or is that redundant?
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jul 12, 2007 at 9:22 AM
So if you do a belly flop into a pool of jellyfish, does that mean you just belly smacked and smacked a smack?
Posted by Dan G. Switzer, II on Jul 12, 2007 at 12:20 PM
Can you be more spineless than a smack?
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jul 12, 2007 at 12:25 PM
I noticed this while working on performance optimization but I did not change it because it didn't hurt and more importantly, wanted to avoid any risk of breaking existing app even though it is undocumented. Sometimes backward compatibility makes you do strange things :-)
Posted by Rupesh Kumar on Jul 13, 2007 at 3:52 AM
@Rupesh,
Yeah, very true. Especially since it's not hurting anyone, just leave it alone. However, if there was a subset of TimeMasks that were documented to work in DateFormat(), I bet that would make a TON of people happy :)
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jul 13, 2007 at 7:32 AM