asctime

 

C

Compiler support

Language

Headers

Type support

Program utilities

Variadic function support

Error handling

Dynamic memory management

Strings library

Algorithms

Numerics

Date and time utilities

Input/output support

Localization support

Concurrency support (C11)

Technical Specifications

Symbol index

 

Date and time utilities

Functions

Time manipulation

difftime

time

clock

timespec_get (C11)

timespec_getres (C23)

Format conversions

asctimeasctime_s (deprecated in C23)(C11)

ctimectime_s (deprecated in C23)(C11)

strftime

wcsftime (C95)

gmtimegmtime_rgmtime_s (C23)(C11)

localtimelocaltime_rlocaltime_s (C23)(C11)

mktime

Constants

CLOCKS_PER_SEC

Types

tm

time_t

clock_t

timespec (C11)

 

Defined in header <time.h>
char* asctime( const tm* time_ptr );

Converts given calendar time tm to a textual representation. The resulting string has the following format:

Www Mmm dd hh:mm:ss yyyy\n

• Www - the day of the week (one of Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun).
• Mmm - the month (one of Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec).
• dd - the day of the month
• hh - hours
• mm - minutes
• ss - seconds
• yyyy - years

The function does not support localization.

Parameters

time_ptr

-

pointer to a tm object specifying the time to print

Return value

pointer to a static null-terminated character string holding the textual representation of date and time, followed by a new line character. The string may be shared between asctime and ctime, and may be overwritten on each invocation of any of those functions.

Notes

This function returns a pointer to static data and is not thread-safe. POSIX marks this function obsolete and recommends strftime instead.

The behavior is undefined if the output string would be longer than 25 characters, if timeptr->tm_wday or timeptr->tm_mon are not within the expected ranges, or if timeptr->tm_year exceeds INT_MAX-1990.

Some implementations handle timeptr->tm_mday==0 as meaning the last day of the preceding month.

Example

Run this code

#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
 
int main ()
{
    time_t rawtime;
    struct tm *timeinfo;
 
    time(&rawtime);
    timeinfo = localtime(&rawtime);
    printf("The current date/time is: %s", asctime(timeinfo));
 
    return 0;
}

Possible output:

The current date/time is: Wed Oct  9 10:28:03 2013

See also

ctimectime_s (deprecated in C23)(C11)	converts a time_t object to a textual representation (function)
strftime	converts a tm object to custom textual representation (function)
C++ documentation for asctime