Formatting dates in std.datetime?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, April 20, 2012 13:29:34 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Is there a way to format std.datetime.Date objects with a custom format
> string? In particular, I'd like to reuse month short names defined in
> std.datetime, but it appears that the names are private. I'd really
> rather not duplicate them by hand, if there's a way to get them.
> 
> Alternatively, if there's a date formatting function that lets you use
> strftime-like format strings, that would work too.

Such functionality does not currently exist. It was too much to design it on 
top of everything else when std.datetime was initially put up for review. 
There was a lot to it already. There has been some discussion on how to design 
the format strings ( 
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/mailman.1806.1324525352.24802.digitalmars-
d at puremagic.com ), but nothing has been actually added to std.datetime yet. My 
proposed format is very good, I think, but the examples that I chose were 
nasty enough that a number of people weren't all that happy with it. Stewart's 
proposal is more user-friendly for the basic stuff, but I don't think that it 
does as well with the more complicated stuff. I haven't decided what I'm going 
to do about it yet. It's on my TODO list.

As for the month names, they're private and will stay that way. Really, 
they're an internationalization issue, and having them in the first place was 
already debatable (they're there primarily because of toSimpleString, which 
came from Boost and they almost didn't end up in there at all).

Once the custom format string stuff has been sorted out, it will end up with a 
way to indicate that you want either the English abbreviations (which 
std.datetime currently uses) or the locale-specific ones, but that's the 
closest that you're ever going to get to have access to them without copying 
them yourself.

- Jonathan M Davis