How do I get the day month and year from a Windows cmd.exe script?

Question

How do I get the current day month and year from inside a Windows cmd script? I need to get each value into a separate variable.

Answer 1

Extract Day, Month and Year

The highest voted function and the accepted one do NOT work locale-independently since the DATE command is subject to localization too. For example (the accepted one): In English you have YYYY for year and in Holland it is JJJJ. So this is a no-go. The following script takes the users' localization from the registry, which is locale-independent.

@echo off

::: Begin set date
setlocal EnableExtensions EnableDelayedExpansion

:: Determine short date format (independent from localization) from registry
for /f "skip=1 tokens=3-5 delims=- " %%L in ( '2^>nul reg query "HKCU\Control Panel\International" /v "sShortDate"' ) do ( 

    :: Since we can have multiple (short) date formats we only use the first char from the format in a new variable
    set "_L=%%L" && set "_L=!_L:~0,1!" && set "_M=%%M" && set "_M=!_M:~0,1!" && set "_N=%%N" && set "_N=!_N:~0,1!"

    :: Now assign the date values to the new vars
    for /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/-. " %%D in ( "%date%" ) do ( set "!_L!=%%D" && set "!_M!=%%E" && set "!_N!=%%F" )
)


:: Print the values as is
echo.
echo This is the original date string --^> %date%
echo These are the splitted values    --^> Day: %d%, Month:%m%, Year: %y%.
echo.

endlocal

Extract only the Year

For a script I wrote I wanted only to extract the year (locale-independent) so I came up with this oneliner as I couldn't find any solution. It uses the 'DATE' var, multiple delimiters and checks for a number greater than 31. That then will be the current year. It's low on resources in contrast to some of the other solutions.

@echo off

setlocal EnableExtensions

for /f " tokens=2-4 delims=-./ " %%D in ( "%date%" ) do ( if %%D gtr 31 ( set "_YEAR=%%D" ) else ( if %%E gtr 31 ( set "_YEAR=%%E" ) else ( if %%F gtr 31 ( set "_YEAR=%%F" ) ) ) )

echo And the year is... %_YEAR%.
echo.

endlocal