Formatted date tag

Dr. Richard S. Wallace
ALICE A. I. Foundation
July, 2005 

Pandorabots supports three extension attributes to the date element in
templates:

 
         locale
         format
         timezone
 
locale allows the language to be selected using standard
language/region names. It defaults to en_US. The set of supported
locales are:

 
af_ZA  ar_OM  da_DK  en_HK  es_CO  es_PY  fr_CA  is_IS  mt_MT  sh_YU  vi_VN
ar_AE  ar_QA  de_AT  en_IE  es_CR  es_SV  fr_CH  it_CH  nb_NO  sk_SK  zh_CN
ar_BH  ar_SA  de_BE  en_IN  es_DO  es_US  fr_FR  it_IT  nl_BE  sl_SI  zh_HK
ar_DZ  ar_SD  de_CH  en_NZ  es_EC  es_UY  fr_LU  ja_JP  nl_NL  sq_AL  zh_SG
ar_EG  ar_SY  de_DE  en_PH  es_ES  es_VE  ga_IE  kl_GL  nn_NO  sr_YU  zh_TW
ar_IN  ar_TN  de_LU  en_SG  es_GT  et_EE  gl_ES  ko_KR  no_NO  sv_FI
ar_IQ  ar_YE  el_GR  en_US  es_HN  eu_ES  gv_GB  kw_GB  pl_PL  sv_SE
ar_JO  be_BY  en_AU  en_ZA  es_MX  fa_IN  he_IL  lt_LT  pt_BR  ta_IN
ar_KW  bg_BG  en_BE  en_ZW  es_NI  fa_IR  hi_IN  lv_LV  pt_PT  te_IN
ar_LB  bn_IN  en_BW  es_AR  es_PA  fi_FI  hr_HR  mk_MK  ro_RO  th_TH
ar_LY  ca_ES  en_CA  es_BO  es_PE  fo_FO  hu_HU  mr_IN  ru_RU  tr_TR
ar_MA  cs_CZ  en_GB  es_CL  es_PR  fr_BE  id_ID  ms_MY  ru_UA  uk_UA
 
format is a format string as given to the Unix strftime function:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/strftime.html
 
You can include your own message in the format string, along with one
or more format control strings.  These format control strings tell the
date function whether to print the date or time, whether to use AM or
PM, a 24 hour clock or a 12 hour, abbreviate the day of the week or
not, and so on.  Some of the supported format control strings include:

 

%a Abbreviated weekday name

%A Full weekday name

%b Abbreviated month name

%B Full month name

%c Date and time representation appropriate for locale

%d Day of month as decimal number (01 . 31)

%H Hour in 24-hour format (00 . 23)

%I Hour in 12-hour format (01 . 12)

%j Day of year as decimal number (001 . 366)

%m Month as decimal number (01 . 12)

%M Minute as decimal number (00 . 59)

%p Current locale.s A.M./P.M. indicator for 12-hour clock

%S Second as decimal number (00 . 59)

%U Week of year as decimal number, with Sunday as first day of week (00 . 53)

%w Weekday as decimal number (0 . 6; Sunday is 0)

%W Week of year as decimal number, with Monday as first day of week (00 . 53)

%x Date representation for current locale

%X Time representation for current locale

%y Year without century, as decimal number (00 . 99)

%Y Year with century, as decimal number

%Z Time-zone name or abbreviation; no characters if time zone is unknown

%% Percent sign

 

 
If you don't specify a format you'll just get the date using the
default format for the particular locale.

 

timezone is the time zone expressed as the number of hours west of GMT.

 

If any of the attributes are invalid, it will fall back to the default 

behavior of <date/> (ie with no attributes specified)

 

To display the date and time in French using Central European time you
would use:

 
         <date locale="fr_FR" timezone="-1" format="%c"/>
 
You can also improve the specificity of common certain time and date
related inquiries to the ALICE bot, as illustrated by the following
dialogue fragment.


Human: what day is it 
ALICE: Thursday. 
Human: what month is it 
ALICE: December. 
Human: what year is this 
ALICE: 2004. 
Human: what is the date 
ALICE: Thursday, December 02, 2004.