A character string containing the current date and time. The returned string has the following fixed, 23-character format: dd-mmm-yyyy hh:mm:ss.cc When the current day of the month is any of the values 1 to 9, the first character in the returned string is a blank character. The time portion of the string is always in character position 13, at an offset of 12 characters from the beginning of the string. Note that you must use the assignment operator (=) to preserve the blank character in the returned string. If you use the string assignment operator (:=), the leading blank is dropped.