Languages regional (metadata) settings

LiveAgent allows you to personalize language regional settings such as date and time formats, number separators, and text direction. These settings influence how date, time, and numerical values are displayed in tickets, reports, and other areas.

To adjust language regional settings in LiveAgent, navigate to Configuration > System > Languages, select the language you want to edit by clicking on the Edit button (Pencil icon) in the Actions column, and navigate to the Language metadata tab.

Configurable language metadata fields

You can change the pattern in the Date format, Time format, and Short time format fields to display the date and/or time in your preferred style. These formats apply for the following information:

• Date format - applied to the date records in reports and to the record displayed upon hovering over any date or time record in a ticket
• Time format - applied to the time records in reports and to the record displayed upon hovering over any date or time record in a ticket
• Short time format - applied to the time records of chat or call messages
• Thousands separator & Decimal separator - applied to numerical values in reports

Please note that patterns are case sensitive.

Most commonly used formats

Here are some examples of the most common date and time format patterns and their resulting formatted text:

Date format

Time format

Short time format

Overriding all languages by uniform regional settings

LiveAgent also offers the option to override the language metadata settings of all languages and apply uniform settings for all agents. For that, navigate to Configuration > General > Regional settings.

Understanding Date and Time Format Patterns

Each date and time format pattern consists of a combination of letters that determines how the date and time are displayed. Patterns are case sensitive, and the number of letters used affects the format:

• Text
  • Use 4 or more letters for the full form (e.g. "EEEE" generates "Friday")
  • Use fewer than 4 for the abbreviated form, if its available (e.g. "EEE" generates "Fri")
• Number
  • Use any number of letters, shorter numbers will be zero-padded to the specified length (e.g. "m" generates "6" and "mm" generates "06")
    • Unlike other fields, fractional seconds are padded with zeros on the right (e.g. "SS" generates "92" and "SSS" generates "920")
    • The year is handled especially - if the count of 'y' is 2, the Year will be truncated to the last 2 digits. (e.g. "yyyy" generates "1997" and "yy" generates "97")
• Text or Number
  • Use 3 letters or more for text (e.g. "MMM" generates "Jan", and "MMMM" generates "January")
  • Use fewer than 3 letters for numbers (e.g. "M" generates "1" and "MM" generates "01")

Characters outside the [a-z] and [A-Z] ranges are treated as quoted text. For example, characters like space, dot, colon, semicolon, hashtag, anchor, etc. will be displayed in the resulting date and time even if they are not enclosed within ' ' custom text enclosing marks. The following symbols can be used to create custom date and time format patterns:

Other advanced examples

Here are some examples of custom date and time format patterns and their resulting formatted text: