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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T01:10:26+00:00

Does anyone know if there’s a way to format the date generated by strftime

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Does anyone know if there’s a way to format the date generated by strftime in Vim (under MS Windows) such that Month, Day, and Hour are not padded to two digits with a leading zero?

For example, the following commands in vimrc:

nmap <F3> a<C-R>=strftime("%I:%M %p %m/%d/%Y ")<CR><Esc>
imap <F3> <C-R>=strftime("%I:%M %p %m/%d/%Y ")<CR>

will print 

03:32 AM 07/09/2010

into the file, if it was actually July 9th.

I’d like to know if there’s a format string that will print

3:32 AM 7/9/2010

for vim instead. I know strftime is platform-specific, so I’m looking for a Windows-specific solution, without the use of external tools. I’d also appreciate comments to the effect that this is impossible with those constraints.

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Some operating systems support %k and %e for the single-digit hour and day, respectively. Neither of these seem to be supported on Windows (or not on Windows XP, at least, which is all I’ve got nearby to try it on).

    But all is not lost. Windows does support %x, which gives the date in the 7/9/2010 format you want, and we can get rid of any leading zero with a call to substitute():

    echo substitute(strftime("%I:%M %p %x"), "^0", "", "")

    This prints

    3:50 AM 7/19/2010

    Keep in mind that all of this is specific not only to the OS, but also to the current locale. This really isn’t portable at all.

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