I use Date to bring up today's date.

I put the date in a special format yyyymmdd using Format->date-> custom

Now I want to convert this yyyymmdd into a string with exactly the same
digits so that I can append it to a hyperlink.

Every method I have tried either turns it into a text string with the
date in the old format or else a text string of some obscure number
equivalent (39183 in the case of today's date).