Curiously Chase

Using Current Date and Time In VS Code Snippets

Learn how to use current date and time in VS Code Snippets.

Previously when generating new blog articles (inVS Code, now I generate articles in Obsidian), adding dates to Markdown frontmatter was a manual step that required me to:

  • Determine the date
  • Convert what I read into the date format I use for frontmatter

As of VS Code release 1.20, Snippets have access to the current date and time with one of the following variables:

  • CURRENT_YEAR
  • CURRENT_YEAR_SHORT
  • CURRENT_MONTH
  • CURRENT_DATE
  • CURRENT_HOUR
  • CURRENT_MINUTE
  • CURRENT_SECOND

Now if I want a frontmatter "date" for Markdown for the current year, month and day (YYYY-MM-DD), I can add the following to my snippet:

date: "\"$CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-$CURRENT_DATE\""

Using the published date of this post, the expanded snippet produces:

date: "2018-07-24"

Markdown snippet with current date and time automatically inserted

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