How to insert 4 digit year that shows up in \today?

Question

Using the LaTeX command \today, I can insert the current date. Is there any way to insert the current year with a simple command? All I want is the simple 4 digit year that shows up in \today.

score 119 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 15 '20 at 23:43

119

\the\year{}

Here \year represents a number and \the lets you output it as a text.

edited Apr 15 '20 at 23:43

mdeff

125

answered Jul 06 '10 at 11:12

abenthy

1,291

3

For the sake of completeness, is there a way to get just '10 – Geoff Jul 06 '10 at 12:50
7

@Geoff: Here is a stupid one :) \newcounter{fooyear} \setcounter{fooyear}{\the\year} \addtocounter{fooyear}{-2000} and then use it in the document with '\arabic{fooyear} But its usage is limited to this century :P – percusse Jun 02 '11 at 19:00
is \year from the datetime package? – Trevor Boyd Smith Jul 27 '12 at 17:59
how does \the display the numerical year as a string? (i didn't know latex had datatypes... i thought everything was strings) – Trevor Boyd Smith Jul 27 '12 at 17:59
4

Leaving out curly braces can cause dropped spaces. You may prefer: \the\year{} – jtpereyda Mar 09 '14 at 04:05
Is there something similar for month \the\month just prints 6 for June instead of 06 – somenxavier Jun 25 '21 at 19:15

score 14 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 02 '11 at 18:53

14

For the sake of Geoff's question above, here is some short code to only get the year, without changing any of the build-in macros.

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\def\Year#1{%
  \def\yy@##1##2##3##4;{##3##4}%
  \expandafter\yy@#1;
}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\Year{\the\year}
\end{document}

answered Jun 02 '11 at 18:53

yannisl

117,160

1

Note that this yields a 2 digit year as requested by @Geoff. – Peter Grill Jan 31 '12 at 03:22
I found that \year=10\relax would work, too. – Skillmon Aug 21 '17 at 19:06
you may want to put a % after the semicolon. – Bart Michels May 21 '19 at 11:16

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 02 '11 at 19:16

5

\documentclass{article}

\def\Year{\expandafter\YEAR\the\year}
\def\YEAR#1#2#3#4{#3#4}

\begin{document}
\Year 
\end{document}

answered Jun 02 '11 at 19:16

2

Of course this fails if one tries to set a letter sent by Charlemagne to the Pope or a letter sent by some future descendant that writes in year 20124. :) – egreg Jun 02 '11 at 19:37
Note that this yields a 2 digit year as requested by @Geoff. – Peter Grill Jan 31 '12 at 03:21
@egreg - did you know that Charlemagne could not write? – Michael Palmer Jan 25 '19 at 18:13
2

@MichaelPalmer But he had scribes! :-) – egreg Jan 25 '19 at 18:18

How to insert 4 digit year that shows up in \today?

3 Answers3