Using Current Date and Time In VS Code Snippets

Previously when generating new blog articles, adding dates to Markdown frontmatter was a manual step that required me to:

• Determine the date
• Convert what I read into the date format I use for frontmatter

As of VS Code release 1.20, Snippets have access to the current date and time with one of the following variables:

• CURRENT_YEAR
• CURRENT_YEAR_SHORT
• CURRENT_MONTH
• CURRENT_DATE
• CURRENT_HOUR
• CURRENT_MINUTE
• CURRENT_SECOND

Now if I want a frontmatter "date" for Markdown for the current year, month and day (YYYY-MM-DD), I can add the following to my snippet:

date: \"$CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-$CURRENT_DATE\"

Using the published date of this post, the expanded snippet produces:

date: "2018-07-24"