HOWTO: Customise Thunderbird Date Format

31Aug05

Customising Thunderbird’s date format on Unix and Linux.
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I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my mail client at work on Solaris 10. One of the annoying things with Thunderbird is the fact that it relies on the current locale setting to format the date and times on emails. As a result changing the date format is a bit of a pain in the arse.

Normally, my locale is either set to C or en_GB and as a result, my dates are formatted either as “08/31/05 13:10:23” (%m/%d/%y %H:%M:%S) or “31/08/05 1:10pm” (%d/%m/%y %r). Now I’m a bit fussy and prefer my dates to be in the UK format, but my times in the American (C) 24 hour format.

Today, I finally got round to sorting it out… I ran the following oneliner to iterate through all the available installed locales and print off their date and time format:

$ for x in `locale -a`
do
echo “$x”
LC_ALL=$x locale -k d_fmt t_fmt
echo “===”
done > ~/tmp/datefmts.out
$

This printed out all the locales and the date and time formats used for each locale and bunged them into a file. A quick squiz through the file revealed just the formatting I want:

=== ca d_fmt="%d/%m/%y" t_fmt="%H:%M:%S" ===

So, now I start Thunderbird using “$ LC_ALL=ca /usr/local/bin/thunderbird &” and I get my desired format.

Filed under: HOWTO, Mozilla | . |

7 Responses to “HOWTO: Customise Thunderbird Date Format”

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1 What is Linux? on Nov 11th, 2007 said:

Thank you! I was going mad with Thunderbird ignoring KDE’s date preference. Like you, I needed 24 hour time, the proper year-month-day order, and dashes instead of slashes.
2 Ivan on Apr 5th, 2008 said:

Hi, I was dealing with this incorrect data format in Thunderbird as well. It was ‘hard set’ to an american format mm-dd-yyyy but I am using a dd-mm-yyyy format. I tried to apply a lot of solutions found on the internet but no luck. The only one working fine for me is here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=595982
3 George on Sep 4th, 2008 said:

Thanx!!!Nice work
4 wwwillem on Nov 6th, 2008 said:

Good stuff!! But isn’t it weird? I would like to have my date/time in ISO standard “yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss”.

So I used the little shell script to extract all date/time formats for all locales, and surprise, surprise …. none of the locales has a “yyyy-mm-dd” date format. The closest one is “yy-mm-dd” (fr_CA), but you can’t get 4 digit years. Mmm, nobody can remember Y2K?
5 Colin on Nov 7th, 2008 said:

I had the same annoyance wwwillem. The only alternate solution I can think of is to create your own locale with your desired date format. Probably a bit OTT, but gets the job done
6 Atlasz on Nov 9th, 2008 said:

wwwillem, use LC_TIME=en_DK as described here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format

The solution with creating the init file works for me now
7 wwwillem on Nov 12th, 2008 said:

I know about en_DK, but it seems to be missing from Solaris. Will test on a Linux box to see if that’s the issue.