The basics of using date and time services

Language Environment includes a complete set of callable services that help HLLs perform date and time calculations. You can use these services to read, calculate, and write values representing the date and time. Language Environment offers unique pattern-matching capabilities that let you process almost any date and time format contained in an input record or produced by operating system services.

You can use date and time services to:
  • Format date and time values by country code
  • Format date and time values using customized formats
  • Parse date values and time values
  • Convert between Gregorian, Julian, Asian, and Lilian formats
  • Calculate days between dates
  • Calculate elapsed time to the nearest millisecond
  • Get local time and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) from the system without a supervisor call (SVC) overhead
  • Properly handle 2-digit years in the year 2000

All Language Environment date and time services are enabled for national language support, including full DBCS support for the Japanese Emperor era .For more information about national language support, see National language support.

All Language Environment date and time services are based on the Gregorian calendar, with Lilian limits as described in Date limits.

Related services

Callable services
CEECBLDY
Converts character date value to the COBOL Integer format. Day one is 01 January 1601 and the value is incremented by one for each subsequent day. This service is similar to CEEDAYS, except that it provides an answer in COBOL Integer format, so that it is compatible with ANSI COBOL intrinsic functions. It should not be used with other Language Environment date or time services.
CEEDATE
Converts dates in the Lilian format to character values
CEEDATM
Converts number of seconds to character timestamp
CEEDAYS
Converts character date values to the Lilian format. Day one is 15 October 1582, and the value is incremented by one for each subsequent day.
CEEDYWK
Provides day of week calculation
CEEGMT
Gets current Greenwich Mean Time (date and time)
CEEGMTO
Gets difference between Greenwich Mean Time and local time
CEEISEC
Converts binary year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and millisecond to a number representing the number of seconds since 00:00:00 14 October 1582
CEELOCT
Gets current date and time
CEEQCEN
Queries the century window
CEESCEN
Sets the century window
CEESECI
Converts a number representing the number of seconds since 00:00:00 14 October 1582 to seven separate binary integers representing year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and millisecond
CEESECS
Converts character timestamps (a date and time) to the number of seconds since 00:00:00 14 October 1582
CEEUTC
Same as CEEGMT

See z/OS Language Environment Programming Reference for syntax and examples of these callable services.

Parent topic: Using date and time services