Is there programmatical way to get short day names in windows?

Question

Is there a way to get a 2 character day-name of the week such as MO/TU/WE/TH/FR/SA/SU?

Currently I only know of using FormatDateTime():

 "ddd" returns "Fri"
 "dddd" returns "Friday"

The main reason is that I want to obtain localized version of the 1 or 2 character day names:

Say FRIDAY in "ddd" would return:
French Windows = "Vendredi", the 2 char would be "VE", note it's the 1st and 2nd char.
Chinese Windows = "星期五", the char would be "五", note it's the 3rd char.
Japanese Windows = "金曜日", the char would be "金", note it's the 1st char.

Edit1: Currently using Delphi, but i think applies to other languages too.

Edit2: Simply put, I'm looking to obtain the shorter version of "ShortDayName" through the use of some functions or constants, so that I don't have to build a table of constants containing the 7 day "Shorter" day names for every possible windows language.

I wonder if such functions really exist.
Maybe the calendar 1 or 2 char day names in Outlook are hard-coded themselves, right?

Answer 1

Click Here

Depicts the standards in custom date formatting.

You may also use the 'ddd' standard and trim it.

Answer 2

Delphi's routines does nothing special - they just ask OS. Here is how to to it: Retrieving Time and Date Information. I looked through MSDNs docs and found this.

Note, that there is no really such thing as "2 character day-name" or "3 character day-name" here. There are: native ("long" in Delphi), abbreviated ("short" in Delphi) or short (Vista and above, not present in Delphi) formats.

For example, abbreviated name of the day of the week for Monday: Mon (3 chars, en-US), Пн (2 chars, ru-RU).

So, you probably look for LOCALE_SSHORTESTDAYNAMEX format (which is called "short" by MSDN and doesn't appear in Delphi), but it is availavle only on Vista and above.

For example, the following code:

const
  LOCALE_SSHORTESTDAYNAME1 = $60;

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  SetThreadLocale($409);
  ShowMessage(
    GetLocaleStr(GetThreadLocale, LOCALE_SSHORTESTDAYNAME1, '') + #13#10 +
    GetLocaleStr(GetThreadLocale, LOCALE_SABBREVDAYNAME1, '')
             );
end;

will show you:

Mo

Mon

But doing this for Russian will output:

Пн

Пн

Hope my edits make answer more clear ;)

Answer 3

You can get the local names for the days of the week with ShortDayNames and LongDayNames, and you can use DayOfWeek to get the numeric value for the day.

ShortDayNames[Index]; //Returns Fri

or

LongDayNames[Index]; //Returns Friday

The only way I know to shorten them to two chars would be to trim the resulting string

LeftStr(LongDayNames[Index],2);//Returns Fr

So today's Day would be

LeftStr(LongDayNames[DayOfWeek(date)],2); //Returns Fr