Display-Format

This property allows you to set the pattern string that will be used to display the information. Within date and time pattern strings, unquoted letters from 'A' to 'Z' and from 'a' to 'z' are interpreted as pattern letters representing the components of a date or time string. Text can be quoted using single quotes (') to avoid interpretation. "''" represents a single quote. All other characters are not interpreted, they are simply copied into the output string during formatting or matched against the input string during parsing.

The following pattern letters are defined (all other characters from 'A' to 'Z' and from 'a' to 'z' are reserved):

Letter	Date or Time Component	Presentation	Examples
G	Era designator	Text	AD
y	Year	Year	1996; 96
M	Month in year	Month	July; Jul; 07
w	Week in year	Number	27
W	Week in month	Number	2
D	Day in year	Number	189
d	Day in month	Number	10
F	Day of week in month	Number	2
E	Day in week	Text	Tuesday; Tue
a	Am/pm marker	Text	PM
H	Hour in day (0-23)	Number	0
k	Hour in day (1-24)	Number	24
K	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	0
h	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	12
m	Minute in hour	Number	30
s	Second in minute	Number	55
S	Millisecond	Number	978
z	Time zone	General time	Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z	Time zone	RFC 822 time zone	-0800

Pattern letters are usually repeated, as their number determines the exact presentation:

Text	For formatting, if the number of pattern letters is 4 or more, the full form is used; otherwise a short or abbreviated form is used if available. For parsing, both forms are accepted, independently from the number of pattern letters.
Number	For formatting, the number of pattern letters is the minimum number of digits and shorter numbers are zero-padded to this amount. For parsing, the number of pattern letters is ignored unless it is needed to separate two adjacent fields.
Year	For formatting, if the number of pattern letters is 2, the year is truncated to 2 digits; otherwise it is interpreted as a number.   For parsing, if the number of pattern letters is more than 2, the year is interpreted literally, regardless of the number of digits. So using the pattern "MM/dd/yyyy", "01/11/12" parses to Jan 11, 12 A.D.   For parsing with the abbreviated year pattern ("y" or "yy"), SimpleDateFormat must interpret the abbreviated year relative to some century. It does this by adjusting dates to be within 80 years before and 20 years after the time the SimpleDateFormat instance is created. For example, using a pattern of "MM/dd/yy" and a SimpleDateFormat instance created on Jan 1, 1997, the string "01/11/12" would be interpreted as Jan 11, 2012 while the string "05/04/64" would be interpreted as May 4, 1964. During parsing, only strings consisting of exactly two digits, as defined by Character.isDigit(char), will be parsed into the default century. Any other numeric string, such as a one digit string, a three or more digit string, or a two digit string that is not all digits (for example, "-1"), is interpreted literally. So, "01/02/3" or "01/02/003" are parsed as "Jan 2, 3 AD", using the same pattern. Likewise, "01/02/-3" is parsed as "Jan 2, 4 BC".
Month	If the number of pattern letters is 3 or more, the month is interpreted as text; otherwise, it is interpreted as a number.
General time zone	Time zones are interpreted as text if they have names. For time zones representing a GMT offset value, the following syntax is used:   GMTOffsetTimeZone: GMT Sign Hours : Minutes   Sign: one of + -   Hours: Digit Digit Digit   Minutes: Digit Digit   Digit: one of 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9   Hours must be between 0 and 23, and Minutes must be between 00 and 59. The format is locale independent and digits must be taken from the Basic Latin block of the Unicode standard.   For parsing, RFC 822 time zones are also accepted.
RFC 822 time zone	For formatting, the RFC 822 4-digit time zone format is used:   RFC822TimeZone: Sign TwoDigitHours Minutes   TwoDigitHours: Digit Digit   TwoDigitHours must be between 00 and 23. Other definitions are as for general time zones.   For parsing, general time zones are also accepted.

Localized date and time pattern strings are also supported. In these strings, the pattern letters described above may be replaced with other, locale dependent, pattern letters.

If this property is not set, then the display format is retrieved by the current operating system international settings.

 

Example - Define a date-entry control with display format that include era designator, year, month and day

screen section. ...   03 screen-1-de-1 Date-Entry      line 21.2      column 49.5      size 14.5 cells       lines 3.1 cells       id 17      century-date      decoration-background-visible      display-format "G, y-MM-d"      value-format davf-yyyymmdd      calendar-font Bell-MT-10v0-b      decoration-background 12      .