ctime

 

C

Language

Standard Library

Type support

Dynamic memory management

Error handling

Program utilities

Date and time utilities

Strings library

Algorithms

Numerics

Input/output support

Localization support

Thread support (C11)

Atomic operations (C11)

 

Date and time utilities

Functions

Time manipulation

difftime

time

clock

timespec_get (C11)

Format conversions

asctime

ctime

strftime

wcsftime

gmtime

localtime

mktime

Constants

CLOCKS_PER_SEC

Types

tm

time_t

clock_t

timespec (C11)

 

Defined in header <time.h>
char* ctime( const time_t* time );

Converts given time since epoch to a calendar local time and then to a textual representation, as if by calling asctime(localtime(time)). 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

-

pointer to a time_t object specifying the time to print

Return value

pointer to a static null-terminated character string holding the textual representation of date and time. 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. In addition, it modifies the static tm object which may be shared with gmtime and localtime. POSIX marks this function obsolete and recommends strftime instead.

The behavior may be undefined for the values of time_t that result in the string longer than 25 characters (e.g. year 10000)

Example

Run this code

#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(void)
{
    time_t result = time(NULL);
    printf("%s", ctime(&result));
}

Output:

Wed Oct  9 10:33:09 2013

See also

asctime	converts a tm object to a textual representation (function)
strftime	converts a tm object to custom textual representation (function)
C++ documentation for ctime