How do I get the day month and year from a Windows

Question

How do I get the current day month and year from inside a Windows cmd script? I need to get each value into a separate variable.

Answer 1

I think that Andrei Coscodan answer is the best when you can't make many assumptions. But sometimes having a one-liner is nice if you can make some some assumptions. This solution assumes that 'date \t' will return one of two formats. On WindowsXP 'date /t 'returns "11/23/2011", but on Windows7 it returns "Wed 11/23/2011".

FOR /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%a in ('date /t') do (set mm=%%a&set dd=%%b&set yyyy=%%c& (if "%%a:~0,1" gtr "9" set mm=%%b&setdd=%%c&set yyyy=%%d))
:: Test results
echo day in 'DD' format is '%dd%'; month in 'MM' format is '%mm%'; year in 'YYYY' format is '%yyyy%'

Thanks to Andrei Consodan answer to help me with this one-line solution.

Answer 2

LANGUAGE INDEPENDENCY:

The Andrei Coscodan solution is language dependent, so a way to try to fix it is to reserve all the tags for each field: year, month and day on target languages. Consider Portugese and English, after the parsing do a final set as:

set Year=%yy%%aa%
set Month=%mm%
set Day=%dd%

Look for the year setting, I used both tags from English and Portuguese, it worked for me in Brazil where we have these two languages as the most common in Windows instalations. I expect this will work also for some languages with Latin origin like as French, Spanish, and so on.

Well, the full script could be:

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

:: Extract date fields - language dependent
for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/-. " %%i in ('date /t') do (
        set v1=%%i& set v2=%%j& set v3=%%k
        if "%%i:~0,1%%" gtr "9" (set v1=%%j& set v2=%%k& set v3=%%l)

        for /f "skip=1 tokens=2-4 delims=(-)" %%m in ('echo.^|date') do (
            set %%m=!v1!& set %%n=!v2!& set %%o=!v3!
    )
)

:: Final set for language independency (English and Portuguese - maybe works for Spanish and French)
set year=%yy%%aa%
set month=%mm%
set day=%dd%


:: Testing
echo Year:[%year%] - month:[%month%] - day:[%day%]

endlocal
pause

I hope this helps someone that deal with diferent languages.

Answer 3

Extract Day, Month and Year

The highest voted function and the accepted one do NOT work locale-independently since the DATE command is subject to localization too. For example (the accepted one): In English you have YYYY for year and in Holland it is JJJJ. So this is a no-go. The following script takes the users' localization from the registry, which is locale-independent.

@echo off

::: Begin set date
setlocal EnableExtensions EnableDelayedExpansion

:: Determine short date format (independent from localization) from registry
for /f "skip=1 tokens=3-5 delims=- " %%L in ( '2^>nul reg query "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v "sShortDate"' ) do ( 

    :: Since we can have multiple (short) date formats we only use the first char from the format in a new variable
    set "_L=%%L" && set "_L=!_L:~0,1!" && set "_M=%%M" && set "_M=!_M:~0,1!" && set "_N=%%N" && set "_N=!_N:~0,1!"

    :: Now assign the date values to the new vars
    for /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/-. " %%D in ( "%date%" ) do ( set "!_L!=%%D" && set "!_M!=%%E" && set "!_N!=%%F" )
)


:: Print the values as is
echo.
echo This is the original date string --^> %date%
echo These are the splitted values    --^> Day: %d%, Month:%m%, Year: %y%.
echo.

endlocal

Extract only the Year

For a script I wrote I wanted only to extract the year (locale-independent) so I came up with this oneliner as I couldn't find any solution. It uses the 'DATE' var, multiple delimiters and checks for a number greater than 31. That then will be the current year. It's low on resources in contrast to some of the other solutions.

@echo off

setlocal EnableExtensions

for /f " tokens=2-4 delims=-./ " %%D in ( "%date%" ) do ( if %%D gtr 31 ( set "_YEAR=%%D" ) else ( if %%E gtr 31 ( set "_YEAR=%%E" ) else ( if %%F gtr 31 ( set "_YEAR=%%F" ) ) ) )

echo And the year is... %_YEAR%.
echo.

endlocal

Answer 4

To get the year, month, and day you can use the %date% environment variable and the :~ operator. %date% expands to something like Thu 08/12/2010 and :~ allows you to pick up specific characters out of a variable:

set year=%date:~10,4%
set month=%date:~4,2%
set day=%date:~7,2%
set filename=%year%_%month%_%day%

Use %time% in similar fashion to get what you need from the current time.

set /? will give you more information on using special operators with variables.

Answer 5

The following batch code returns the components of the current date in a locale-independent manner and stores day, month and year in the variables CurrDay, CurrMonth and CurrYear, respectively:

for /F "skip=1 delims=" %%F in ('
    wmic PATH Win32_LocalTime GET Day^,Month^,Year /FORMAT:TABLE
') do (
    for /F "tokens=1-3" %%L in ("%%F") do (
        set CurrDay=0%%L
        set CurrMonth=0%%M
        set CurrYear=%%N
    )
)
set CurrDay=%CurrDay:~-2%
set CurrMonth=%CurrMonth:~-2%
echo Current day  :  %CurrDay%
echo Current month:  %CurrMonth%
echo Current year :%CurrYear%

There are two nested for /F loops to work around an issue with the wmic command, whose output is in unicode format; using a single loop results in additional carriage-return characters which impacts proper variable expansion.

Since day and month may also consist of a single digit only, I prepended a leading zero 0 in the loop construct. Afterwards, the values are trimmed to always consist of two digits.

Answer 6

A variant of script that works locale-independently. Put it in a text file with .cmd extension and run.

::: Begin set date

for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/-. " %%i in ('date /t') do (call :set_date %%i %%j %%k %%l)
goto :end_set_date

:set_date
if "%1:~0,1%" gtr "9" shift
for /f "skip=1 tokens=2-4 delims=(-)" %%m in ('echo,^|date') do (set %%m=%1&set %%n=%2&set %%o=%3)
goto :eof

:end_set_date
::: End set date

echo day in 'DD' format is %dd%; month in 'MM' format is %mm%; year in 'YYYY' format is %yy%

The variables %dd%, %mm% and %yy% will keep the day('DD' format), the month('MM' format) and the year('YYYY' format) respectively.