CDate
Coerces an expression to a Date.
Syntax: CDate( expression )
- expression
- required Any valid date expression — a date literal, a date/time string, or a number that falls within the range of acceptable dates.
The return type is Date.
Use the IsDate function to determine whether expression can be converted to a date or time. CDate recognizes date literals and time literals as well as some numbers that fall within the range of acceptable dates. When converting a number to a date, the whole-number portion is converted to a date. Any fractional part of the number is converted to a time of day, starting at midnight.
CDate recognizes date formats according to the locale setting of your system. The correct order of day, month, and year may not be determined if it is provided in a format other than one of the recognized date settings. In addition, a long date format is not recognized if it also contains the day-of-the-week string.
CVDate is also provided for compatibility with previous versions of Visual Basic. The syntax of CVDate is identical to CDate; however, CVDate returns a Variant whose subtype is Date instead of an actual Date type.
Example
This example uses the CDate function to convert a string to a Date. In general, hard-coding dates and times as strings (as shown in this example) is not recommended. Use date literals and time literals, such as #2/12/1969# and #4:45:23 PM#, instead.
Dim MyDate, MyShortDate, MyTime, MyShortTime
MyDate = "February 12, 1969" ' Define date.
MyShortDate = CDate(MyDate) ' Convert to Date data type.
MyTime = "4:35:47 PM" ' Define time.
MyShortTime = CDate(MyTime) ' Convert to Date data type.