asctime() is an I/O function that converts the contents of a structure "struct" pointed by the pointer "ptr" into the format "day month date hours:minutes:seconds year\n\o". This function converts it to a C string containing a human-readable version.

The structure pointer passed to this function is either obtained using localtime() or gmttime(). The formatted output string returned by this function is stored in a static character array. This array is overwritten each time the function is called.

    char *asctime(const struct tm *ptr);

   #include <stdio.h>
   #include <time.h>
   int main( )
     {
       struct tm *p;
       time_t t;
       t = time(NULL);
       p = localtime(&t);
       printf("The current localtime is :: %s\n",asctime(p));
       return 0;
     }

   The current localtime is :: Mon Mar 08 15:18:09 2010

In the above example asctime() is used to convert the structure and find the current localtime.