Custom date field formatting with smarty

Question

I'm trying to format a custom date field using smarty to send emails. What I want is to have the day of the week included, as "Wednesday, April 18, 2018". It seems that this should work:

{contact.custom_105|date_format:"%A, %B %e, %Y"}

But the mail send hangs. Also hangs if I just use

{contact.custom_105|date_format}

I can use {contact.custom_105} to send the preformatted date "03/01/2018 3:15AM", so I know I'm working with the correct field.

How can I get this formatted as I want?

Answer 1

Found the answer. The civi field token must be captured to a Smarty variable first:

{capture assign=arr}{contact.custom_105}{/capture}{$arr|date_format:"%A, %B %e, %Y"}