asctime
is a function in C, defined in the header file time.h
. It takes a tm
object as input and returns a pointer to a string containing the year, month, days, hours, minutes, and seconds in the Www mmm dd hh:mm:ss yyyy
format.
asctime
takes in a single, mandatory, parameter which is a pointer to an object of type tm
. Following is the declaration of the tm
structure:
tm_sec
: Seconds passed in a minute seconds (0-59)
tm_min
: Minutes passed in an hour (0-59)
tm_hour
: Hours passed in a day (0-23)
tm_mday
: Days passed in a month (1-31)
tm_mon
: Months passed in a year (0-11)
tm_wday
: Days passed in a week (0-6)
tm_yday
: Days passed in a year (0-365)
tm_year
: Years passed since 1900
The asctime
function returns a pointer to a string containing the year, month, days, hours, minutes, and seconds values stored in the tm
object received as input. The pointed string is in the Www mmm dd hh:mm:ss yyyy
format.
Www:
three character abbreviation of the weekday with a capital first letter (Sun)
Mmm:
three character abbreviation of the month with a capital first letter(e.g., Dec)
dd:
two digit day of the month (01-31)
hh:
two digit hour (0-23)
mm:
two digit minute (0-59)
ss:
two digit second (0-59)
yyyy:
four digit year (e.g. 2021)
The following example uses the time
function to generate a UTC value for the current time. This value is then used to populate a tm
object using the gmtime
function. Finally, we use the asctime
function to generate a string for the current time format: Www mmm dd hh:mm:ss yyyy
.
#include <stdio.h>#include <time.h>int main () {// creating an object to put the current time intime_t current_time;// inserting th current UTC time in the objecttime(¤t_time);// creating a tm object to hold the output of the gmt functionstruct tm *curr_t_struct;curr_t_struct = gmtime(¤t_time );//printing the date string using the asctime functionprintf("This today's date and time: %2s\n", asctime(curr_t_struct));return(0);}
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