Delphi/Lazarus: Display current Date and Time

Today, I would like to show you how to be able to show the date and/or time in your Delphi or Lazarus application.

For this, only two functions are important. With the function "now", you can get the current timestamp as TDateTime and using FormatDateTime, you can change this into an arbitrary formatting. The result is a string, you can process further.

var
  s: string;
begin
  s := FormatDateTime('yyyy-mm-dd, hh:nn:ss', now);
  ShowMessage(s); 
end;

FormatDateTime requires two parameters: a format string and the time that should be displayed (here: "now").

In the format string, "yyyy" stands for a year in 4 digits, "mm" is a 2 digit months and accordingly, "dd", "hh", "nn" and "ss" are standing for day, hour, minute and second.

Other formats are possible by changing the formatting string:

FormatDateTime('dd/mm/yyyy hh:nn:ss', now);  // 31/12/2020 23:59:00
FormatDateTime('dd.mm.yyyy, hh:nn:ss', now); // 31.12.2020, 23:59:00
FormatDateTime('dd/mm/yy', now);             // 31/12/99
FormatDateTime('yy/mm/dd', now);             // 99/12/31
FormatDateTime('yyyy/mm/dd', now);           // 2020/12/31
FormatDateTime('yy-mm-dd-hh-nn-ss', now);    // 99-12-31-23-59-00
FormatDateTime('d.m.yyyy', now);             // 1.1.2000

If you would like to keep characters such as "d" or "y", you have to put them into double quotes (").