Mastering Date & Time Formatting in Flutter Apps
Published: 2024-02-29 08:14:23

Several times users display the current DateTime in a Text Widget according to their client’s requirement. Here in this writing, we will assist you to know how to format datetime flutter. Let’s start the journey:

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The Dart Method

The Dart in-built way for date formatting in Flutter as per the client’s needs is highly restrictive and limited. On the other hand, whenever you deal with dates, it should be in human-readable format, but dismally there is not any direct method of formatting dates in Flutter unless you use a third-party package.

Date Format

This week’s widget is essential to showcase a specific date or time within your app. This package allows you to display time zone, weekday, time, date, and more, irrespective of their order. So you need to point out a dateformat string in your code, which identifies the pattern of the required text of a datetime object.

The Purpose

Time is a precious thing in today’s highly competitive world. However, no matter what you do, you need to manage your time every day to complete the specific tasks on time. The visual representation of a datetime object is vital for every user.

Also, it is important to decide how time and date should be visible to the users. Is your even is on 13.December.2021, on 13.12.21 or 13/12/21. All these are possible combinations of time and rely on the region where the user lives and the country. Fortunately, the Date Format package offers a decent solution and enables the conversion of Datetime object into a human-readable format.

Package scope

Relying on the client’s need, you need to format DateTime. You should look at intl package. This package offers localization and internationalization features and facilities incorporating bidirectional text, date/number formatting, message translation, genders and plurals.

The scope of the package is very effective and easy. It offers formatting a datetime object into readable text by pointing out the predefined characters. These characters can easily read all relevant information and render it a string.

Let’s check how all these characters seem:

yy or yyyy -> Year M or MM -> String of Month dd or d -> Day w -> week in month m or mm -> Number of Months D or DD -> weekday W or WW -> week in year H or HH -> hour (0–23) h or hh -> hour (0–11) n or nn -> minutes s or ss -> seconds S or SSS -> milliseconds am -> AM or PM z or Z -> timezone u or uuu -> microseconds \\ -> Escape delimiter

An example

The formatting of all these characters is quite easy. You can easily call the function formatDate after importing the package. This function receives a datetime_format and datetime object.

Moreover, an object is passed, and this locale object is utilized to translate the names of a varied number of countries into their respective languages. The parameter uses English as a default language also; it is optional.

formatDate(datetime_object, datetime_format, locale_object);

The datetime_format can be an array or a simple string. The characters are formatted into respective values like hours, days, and weekdays in such cases. It is used in the following app to format the required objects. Additionally, the default option shows the custom variant, and the controller releases a string for formatting.

How to install the package?

This might be a question whenever you start using a third-party package. Moreover, it is ideal for connecting with a professional Flutter mobile application development company to fulfil all your Flutter related requirements.

Installing the package, you can add the latest version of date_format in pubspec.yaml or use the flutter command in the command line.

Run this command:

With Flutter:

$ flutter pub add date_format

With Dart:

$ dart pub add date_format

It will add a line to pubspec.yaml dependencies

date_format: ^2.0.2

Maybe your editor supports flutter pub gets, or dart pub get.

Import it

Now you will have Dart code to use:

import ‘package:date_format/date_format.dart’;

Scores

The package has the popularity of 98%, 130 Pub Points from Flutter and 198 likes. This package supports all current platforms such as iOS, Android, Web, Windows, Linux, macOS and null safety. Its null safety is under BDS license. It also offers some tests for the package testing element Date and Time formats.

Hope this post is helpful to know how you can format date & time in Flutter.