Change Date & Time Format in AMPScript Populated content

Question

I'm working on an e-mail in SalesForce Marketing Cloud that uses AMPScript to populate and event start time. The data extension field that populates the AMP Script is set as a text field, unfortunately that means that times are being set to include seconds instead of just hours and minutes.

Here's what I started with:%%StartTime%% which populates as 2:00:00 PM

I tried the replace function%%=Replace(@StartTime,':00',' ')=%%however this left the field blank.

So I tried %%=FormatDate(%%StartTime%%, "HH:MM", "en-US")=%% and %%=FormatDate(2:00:00 PM, "HH:MM", "en-US")=%% was returned.

Ideas?

Answer 1

Should be this without the double %%:

%%=FormatDate(StartTime, "hh:mm tt, "en-US")=%%

or better:

%%[

var @startTime
set @startTime = AttributeValue("StartTime")
set @startTime = FormatDate(@startTime, "hh:mm tt", "en-US")

]%%

It's currently %%=iif(empty(@startTime), "HAMMER TIME!", @startTime)=%%

Reference: MSDN DateTimeFormatInfo Class

Answer 2

Adam had most of it right but you're getting the same error as I am - you're getting 14:01 because it looks like AMPscript is not differentiating between cases in formatdate(), so your mm is getting displayed as a 2 digit MM month (january in this case as it's the default start month if unspecified). I couldn't get AMPscript to recognize cased date/time format strings so my workaround which is not ideal was to do the following:

%%=DatePart(v(@begin_time), 'hour')=%%:%%=DatePart(v(@begin_time), 'minute')=%% %%=FormatDate(v(@begin_time), 'tt')=%%

That ends up getting me 2:00 PM

EDIT doing DatePart to return Minutes only results in a single 0 which is not helpful when displaying the time. Same works for 'mi' as well.

Answer 3

Your were using an ampscript string call (%%) inside an ampscript block. This is not necessary.

Below the correct code to use :

%%=FormatDate(startTime,"", "hh:mm tt")=%%