Extract DateTime

The result type to extract the Date, Time, or DateTime value to. The converted value is stored in the $current variable.

• No Date: No default date is provided. When selected, if the robot does not find any date to extract, the extraction fails.

• Current Date: When selected, if no date was extracted, the current date is provided.

• Calculated: When selected, if no date was extracted, an expression is used to compute the date, such as a variable or a function.

The Default Date property can be useful in situation where a web page or an application contains one date and multiple instances of time associated with that date. In this case, you can first extract the date into a variable and then extract the time instances using the date variable as the default date. Each extracted time will be a DateTime value with the date part corresponding to the date that was initially extracted.

• Default: If the time zone is found for extraction, it is used. If no time zone is found, the time zone where the robot is being executed is used instead.

• Zone ID: A set of predefined time zone IDs to choose from, such as “Europe/Rome,” “America/Los_Angeles,” “CET,” “Universal,” and so on.

• Offset: A set of predefined zone offsets to choose from, such as "Z," "+01:00," "-08:00," and so on.

• Calculated: A way to get the time zone from a constant or an expression. This time zone can be either a zone ID or an offset. It can be the same as the predefined time zones, but the Calculated option also provides additional formats, such as “+1,” “-08:30:15,” and so on.

• Predefined: Standard extraction formats based on various date formats, such as ISO. You can find a complete list of predefined formats on the docs.oracle.com website.

• Default Patterns: A set of commonly used patters to choose from, such as yyyy-M-d. Note that selecting a Target Type has effect on which patterns will be available on this list.

• Calculated: A pattern that you can create as a constant or with an expression. This option provides the same formats as the Default Patterns option. The patterns consist of letters and combinations of letters, each corresponding to parts of a date, as shown in the following table.

  Letter	Description	Example
  z	time zone ID	z, zz, and zzz match CET; zzzz matches both CET and Central European Time
  Z	time zone offset	Z, ZZ, and ZZZ match +0100; ZZZZ matches GMT+01:00; ZZZZZ matches +01:00
  y	year	yyyy matches 2022; yy matches 22
  M	month	M matches 7 or 07; MM matches 07; MMM matches Jul; and MMMM matches July
  d	day	d matches 1 or 01; dd matches 01
  E	day of week	EEE matches Mon; EEEE matches Monday
  h	hour of clock (1 -12 AM or PM)	H matches 0 or 23; h and hh match 01 or 12 and usually require an a pattern for AM or PM
  a	AM or PM	a matches AM or pm
  m	minutes	mm matches 00 or 43
  s	seconds	ss matches 00 or 43
  S	fraction of second	SSS matches 123

  Also note:

  • Patterns can contain characters such as "-" (hyphen), "/" (slash), and space to separate parts of a date.
  • You can include text in a pattern by enclosing it in single quotation marks.
  • The count of pattern letters determines the result format. For example, with digits, if the count of letters is one, the result would contain any number of digits (d may result in 1, 01 or 31). Otherwise, the count describes the width of the result, such as with month names: a count of three denotes a short form (Jul) and a count of four denotes a full form (July).

    For more information, see the docs.oracle.com website.

Note that time zones are not affected by the locales.