A date‑format string can contain any of the following format keywords along with other characters. The format keywords in the format string are replaced by corresponding values to get the result. The other characters are displayed as literals.

The following table lists the date formats and their corresponding descriptions.

Table 1. Date formats and descriptions
Date format Description
CC The century as a two‑digit number.
YYYY The year as a four‑digit number.
YYY The last three digits of the year.
YY The last two digits of the year.
Y The last digit of the year.
Y,YYY The year as a four‑digit number with a comma after the first digit.
Q The quarter of the year as a one‑digit number (with values 1, 2, 3, or 4).
MM The month value as a two‑digit number (in the range 01-12).
MONTH The name of the month as a string of nine characters ('JANUARY' to 'DECEMBER').
MON The first three characters of the name of the month (in the range'JAN' to 'DEC').
WW The week of the year as a two‑digit number (in the range 01-53).
W The week of the month as a one‑digit number (in the range 1-5).
DDD The day of the year as a three‑digit number (in the range 001-366).
DD The day of the month as a two‑digit number (in the range 01-31).
D The day of the week as a one‑digit number (in the range 1-7, 1 for Sunday and 7 for Saturday).
DAY The day of the week as a character string of nine characters (in the range 'SUNDAY' to 'SATURDAY').
DY The day of the week as a character string of three characters (in the range 'SUN' to 'SAT').
J The Julian day (number of days since DEC 31, 1899) as an eight‑digit number.
TH When added to a format keyword that results in a number, this format keyword ('TH') is replaced by the string 'ST', 'ND', 'RD', or 'TH' depending on the last digit of the number.

Example

The following example illustrates the use of the DAY, MONTH, DD, and TH format strings: 

SELECT C1 FROM T2;
 C1
--
09/29/1952
 1 record selected
  SELECT TO_CHAR (C1, 'Day, Month ddth'),
   TO_CHAR (C2, 'HH12 a.m.') FROM T2;
 TO_CHAR (C1,DAY, MONTH DDTH) TO_CHAR (C2,HH12 A.M.)
---------------------------- ----------------------
Monday, September 29th 02 p.m.
 1 record selected