| Symbol | Description |
| yy | Two digit year |
| yyyy | Four digit year |
| mm | Two digit month, or two digit minutes if following a colon (as in ‘hh:mm’) |
| mmm[m…] | Character short form for months—as many characters as there are “m”s |
| dd | Two digit day of month |
| ddd[d…] | Character short form for day of the week—as many characters as there are “d”s |
| hh | Two digit hours |
| nn | Two digit minutes |
| ss.ssssss | Seconds and fractions of a second, up to six decimal places. Note: Not all platforms support timestamps to a precision of six places. |
| aa | am if needed (12 hour clock) |
| pp | pm if needed (12 hour clock) |
| f | Use French days and months (deprecated) |
Each symbol is substituted with the appropriate data for the date that is being formatted.
For symbols that represent character data (such as mmm), you can control the case of the output as follows:
Type the symbol in all upper case to have the format appear in all upper case. For example, MMM produces JAN.
Type the symbol in all lower case to have the format appear in all lower case. For example, mmm produces jan.
Type the symbol in mixed case to have Adaptive Server Anywhere choose the appropriate case for the language that is being used. For example, in English, typing Mmm produces May, while in French it produces Mai.
For symbols that represent numeric data, you can control zero-padding with the case of the symbols:
Type the symbol in same-case (such as MM or mm) to allow zero padding. For example, yyyy/mm/dd could produce 2013/01/01.
Type the symbol in mixed case (such as Mm) to suppress zero padding. For example, yyyy/Mm/Dd could produce 2013/1/1.