Using Current Date and Time In VS Code Snippets

curiouslychase

Chase Adams

Posted on July 24, 2018

Using Current Date and Time In VS Code Snippets

Previously when generating new blog articles, adding dates to Markdown frontmatter was a manual step that required me to:

  • Determine the date
  • Convert what I read into the date format I use for frontmatter

As of VS Code release 1.20, Snippets have access to the current date and time with one of the following variables:

  • CURRENT_YEAR
  • CURRENT_YEAR_SHORT
  • CURRENT_MONTH
  • CURRENT_DATE
  • CURRENT_HOUR
  • CURRENT_MINUTE
  • CURRENT_SECOND

Now if I want a frontmatter "date" for Markdown for the current year, month and day (YYYY-MM-DD), I can add the following to my snippet:

date: \"$CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-$CURRENT_DATE\"
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Using the published date of this post, the expanded snippet produces:

date: "2018-07-24"
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💖 💪 🙅 🚩
curiouslychase
Chase Adams

Posted on July 24, 2018

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