Inserttime

Inserttime is a placeholder or function used in templating systems and content generation workflows to insert a time value at render time. It typically resolves to the current time and is widely employed to timestamp documents, logs, or reports produced by automated pipelines.

In practice, inserttime is implemented as a directive or function, with variations across systems. It can accept parameters such as a format string and an optional timezone. The format follows common date-time patterns (including ISO 8601), and some implementations support locale-aware rendering. When no parameters are provided, inserttime usually outputs the system time in a default, system-defined format.

Common use cases include automatically inserting publication or last-modified timestamps in static sites, generating audit trails for data processing, inserting time-based values into data exports, and supporting reproducible reporting by recording the time of generation. Developers should consider time zone handling, daylight saving time, and locale when displaying times. Caching can affect whether a rendered value reflects real time or a previously computed timestamp, so appropriate cache policies may be needed in dynamic environments.

Variations exist across platforms; some systems refer to the feature as insertTime, insTime, or use a dedicated time tag. In addition to formatting concerns, users should be aware of potential privacy or security considerations when exposing generation times in publicly accessible documents or logs. See also timestamp, date formatting, and templating languages for related concepts.