Formatting Dates in QGIS labels

Update: Expressions now support date formatting, for example

format_date('2012-05-15','dd.MM.yyyy') → '15.05.2012'

---

Currently, there is work going on related to "expression based labeling": http://hub.qgis.org/issues/3488.

For now, you can use Field Calculator to convert your datetime string to a different format, e.g. YYYY/MM/DD to DD.MM.YYYY like this:

substr(date,8,2)||'.'||substr(date,5,2)||'.'||substr(date,0,4)

Substring syntax is:

substr(string,startpos,length)

If you can open the shape.dbf file in your favorite spreadsheet editor:

• Create a new column, call it temp_date.
• Copy and pate the old date data to temp_date
• Split that column using text to data feature by character \ or whichever happens to be your date splitter
• Reorganize the columns in the order you want
• Create a new column new_date
• In new_date use the following formula =A1 & "/" & B1 & "/" & C1. Of course you need to use the proper fields and not the ones I mentioned.

Of course there could be a default way for QGis to handle date formats, but I haven't seen it. Perhaps, play around wit the field calculator if that helps at all

I'm sure there is an option to do it using the qgis python console, I don't suspect this will be a big deal either using the time /time date modules or just a generic str.replace or reg expression. I'm not verse with the api so I can't help there