Inside our <SQL> loop, we printed out the patent country, number and date. We wanted to print the date in a specific format: although Texis dates are accurate down to the second, we only want to print the month, day and year. For this we used <fmt> .

The <fmt> function is used to specify the exact format of output data. It closely follows the syntax of the C function printf() , in that the first argument is a format string containing percent codes that detail how to print the remaining arguments.

 <$x = "<B>">
 <$y = "</B>">
 <fmt "This is %sbold%s" $x $y> 

 <$x = 12345.5> 
 <fmt "The price is $$%1.2kf" $x> 

 <fmt "q=%U" "what?">

 This is bold


 The price is $12,345.50

 q=what%3F

The first example simply prints out two strings with %s , <B> and </B> . Note that HTML escapement is not done: this is a way to avoid the normal HTML escapement for a variable.

The second example prints a floating-point number as a dollar value. Note the escaped dollar sign in the format - $ is not special to <fmt> per se, but to Vortex it would indicate a variable reference which we don't want (and isn't allowed inside a string). So we escape the dollar to get a literal dollar sign. Following it is a percent sign, introducing the format code. The 1.2 says that the printed field should be at least 1 character wide overall, and have at most 2 decimal places. The k is a flag - unavailable in standard printf - that says to insert commas every three digits. Finally, the f says we're printing a floating-point number.

The last example prints a string using %U . This URL-encodes the argument, and is very useful for hand-constructing query strings in URLs. (However <submit> is often easier.)

In the patent example, we used <fmt> to print out the patent date $pdate in the <search> function:

  <fmt " %at " "%b %e %Y" $pdate> <P>

Here the %t code indicates a time/date is to be printed. The a flag before it says that we're using a specific sub-format for the date, which will be the next argument. This argument is a strftime() -style format, similar to printf() but the codes are for specific parts of a date. %b prints the month name, %e the day of the month, %Y the 4-digit year. Finally the date itself is the next argument.

Automatic casting

If an argument is the wrong type for the corresponding format code, it is automatically converted (cast) to the right type. For example, we could give a string for the date, and Texis would convert it to a date (provided it's in a format known to Texis):

  <fmt "The current time is:\n%t\n" "now">

We gave the string "now " for a time: Texis converts this to a date, knowing that "now" means "the current time". Texis knows other strings as dates, such as "start of last month", "-3 weeks", "next Tuesday", as well as a standard format: "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS".

Escape sequences

Also note the backslash escape in our last example: in a <fmt> format string, the standard C string escape sequences such as \n for a newline are recognized.

Other codes

There are more format codes for printing Roman numerals, automatically highlighting query strings in text, HTML escapement, etc. See the Vortex manual on <fmt> .

strfmt

The <strfmt> function is identical to <fmt> except that instead of printing its output, it is returned in $ret as a string.