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YYYY-MM-DD is the only acceptable date format, as commanded by ISO 8601.
“There shall be no other date formats before ISO8601. Remember this format and keep it as the system default”
Largest to smallest unit of time. It just makes sense.
Sorting by date would be so much better with yyyymmdd .
ISO 8601, while great, has too many formats. May I introduce RFC 3339 instead?
That is what I love so much about standards: there are so many to choose from.
YES! I wish more people knew about RFC 3339. While I’m all for ISO 1601, it’s a bit too loose in its requirements at times, and people often end up surprised that it’s just not the format they picked…
Huh, I’ve never noticed how much bloat was in ISO 8601. I think when most people refer to it, we’re specifically referring to the date (optionally with time) format that is shared with RFC 3339, namely 2023-11-22T20:00:18-05:00 (etc). And perhaps some fuzziness for what separates date and time.
If you have years of files named similarly with the date, you will love the ISO standard and how it keeps things sorted and easy to read.
I have autohotkey configured to insert the current date in ISO 8601 format into my filenames on keyboard shortcut for just this reason. So organized. So pure.
Much date. Very logic.
Glad I can count my own country, Lithuania, among the enlightened.
EDIT: Source of the picture: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Date_format_by_country_NEW.svg
Which color is which?
(This doesn’t consider the separator) Cyan - DD/MM/YY Magenta - MM/DD/YY Yellow - YY/MM/DD The other ones are mixes of those two colors, so e.g. the US is MM/DD/YY and YY/MM/DD (apparently).
Also just noticed I didn’t attribute this picture, I’ll edit my comment.
Canada threw up their hands and said, “Fuck it, I don’t care, use whatever date format you like.”
We are ridiculously inconsistent in Canada. I’ve seen all 3 of the most popular formats here (2023-11-22, 11/22/2023, and 22/11/2023) in similarish amounts. Government forms seem to be increasingly using RFC 3339 dates, but even they aren’t entirely onboard.
where’s that? somewhere in africa?
/s because apparently it’s not implied
Lithuania is one of the Baltic States, conveniently squished between Russia & Belarus to the east and the sea to the west. Across that sea is Sweden. You’ll usually see three countries be the parts of this set. Lithuania is the southernmost of these three.
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I seem to have dropped my /s. But yes.
Except the information is given least to most important, making verbal abbreviation difficult. Works great for file names though.
The truth. Amen
Is that why the military uses that format?
In a GMP laboratory it’s 22NOV2023 no ambiguity.
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ISO 8601 format is the best (YYYY-MM-DD).
Came here to say this. I try to name all my docs in the YYYY-MM-DD-descriptive-name.ext format.
I can see some advantages of that.
I’m American though, so YYYY-DD-MM is the best I can do.
for me, the section that changes the most goes last…
in a whole year, the YYYY never changes, the MM changes only 12 times… i never implementing the day… there’s only so many possibilities i could have had for saved files in June. i just go straight to description
I hope that the comment you answer to was ironical. >!Otherwise there’s no hope for us 😰!<
haha yeah. i just assumed they were kidding, but if not… yikes!
The only correct format. Least to most specific.
I like that for files, but not for written documents. When I label things I try to use the most intuitive/least confusing way I can think of: DD mmm YYYY. This comment is posted on 23 NOV 2023, for example.
Used to be my account name on a different website social media aggregator.
Best nomenclature for sorting.
YYYY-MM-DD (honestly without dashes) is the only helpful format.
If you name all your files with this as a suffix then your files automatically sort versions of themselves in order when sorting by name.
ISO 8601 baby
Though it ought to be a prefix, not a suffix
You mean as a prefix, right?
Their assumption is that the filename is the same otherwise e.g. myNotes20231122.txt
Oh I see, thanks. Good alternative to final3_release2.
Came here to say this, I use DD.MM.YY in day-to-day stuff, but for files it’s either YYYY_MM_DD or YY_MM_DD, the automatic ordering is beautiful
Yeah this method is superior for digital filing. I can’t imagine the sorting clusters I’d have to go through to find what I want any other way
DD/MM/YY and YY/MM/DD are the only acceptable ones IMO. Throwing a DD in between YY and MM is just weird since days move by faster so they should be at one of the ends and since YY moves the slowest it should be on the other end.
I’m not kidding when I ask: are there really a lot of people using MM/DD/YYYY??
I think most Americans do. Or at least it was taught that way in school when I was growing up. Maybe it’s because of the way we speak dates, like “October 23rd” or “May 9th, 2005”.
Regardless, the only true way to write dates is YYYY-MM-DD.
Thanks!
Pretty much every American I’ve ever met. Dates on drivers license, bank info, etc - all in MM/DD/YYYY … or even just MM/DD/YY
I regularly confuse people with YYYY-MM-DD
If you use DD/MM/YYYY, dumb sorting algorithms will put all of the 1sts of every month together, all of the 2nds of every month together, etc. That doesn’t seem very useful unless you’re trying to identify monthly trends, which is fundamentally flawed as things like the number of days in the month or which day of the week a date falls on can significantly disrupt those trends.
With MM/DD/YY, the only issue is multiple years being grouped together. Which may be what you want, especially if the dates are indicating cumulative totals. Depending on the data structure, years are often sorted out separately anyways.
YYYY/MM/DD is definitely the best for sorting. However, the year is often the least important piece in data analysis. Because often the dataset is looking at either “this year” or “the last 12 months”. So the user’s eyes need to just ignore the first 5 characters, which is not very efficient.
If you’re using a tool that knows days vs months vs years that can help, but you can run into compatibility issues when trying to move things around.
The ugly truth no one wants to admit on these conversations is that these formats are tools. Some are better suited to certain jobs than others.
Should just burn it all down and do. MM/YY/DD
I hope you mean YYYY, not just YY
The only reason they place month as first is because it is fits how dates are read in English, but that’s not a good reason to keep that format.
You only think it fits with how it’s read in English because that’s how you grew up saying it so it sounds natural to you. Your experience is not universal, and is in fact, a minority.
Japan is YYYY-MM-DD, but when we talk about dates where a year is unneeded, we just cut it off which leaves it in the US standard format of MM-DD, much to the annoyance of non-US foreigners living here.
It is arguably the best way to name large sets of indexed files on a filesystem.
I think that the best argument is that it makes sense when combined with hours minutes and seconds.
yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss
Goes from large to small units.
It sorts
Japan’s way, you mean?
Yes, YYYY/MM/DD
Files already have computer readable dates that can be used to sort and organize them
In certain instances that may not always be available.
One example I can think of is when browsing on a NAS.
When you’re naming a file, you can’t use anything else.
You’re not wrong. through much trial and error in the 1990s I learned this was the most efficient & accurate & chronologically searchable way to date things.
It actually makes sense when you put YYYY/MM/DD in filenames as they will be sorted pretty neat (ex: reports)
Yeah for a lot of files you probably would sort by year in the end
This meme implies there’s an equal battle between MM/DD/YY and DD/MM/YY, which is nonsense. Much like imperial units, only 'murica uses MM/DD/YY.
Oi guvnah, ow many stone chu weigh?
Only one, but it has my exact weight
If you look at the calendar, you’ll see that we are not in 1900 anymore.
No one I know measures their own weight in imperial.
Talking about fuel efficiency in miles per liter 🤣
I have 2 stones if that’s what you’re asking.
Liberia and Myanmar also use imperial units, but they’re both starting to move towards metric in recent years so soon the US truly will be alone in that
But 'murica is big.
Only slightly bigger than Australia and Western Australia is nearly twice the size of Texas…
When talking about cultural mindshare I’d argue that the quantity of people matters more than the space they’ve been packed into
Mercator would like a word.
Mercator can say whatever it wants, it’s not involved in this discussion.
YYYY-MM-DD in Hungary too, that us shit is totally non logical, i cant get used to it
This is literally the most logical method to name a date in text.
In what text?
In French we say “14 juillet 1789”
We don’t even say “nth day of”
In a text like “the research started at 2003-01-24”, or pretty much in any other text where you need to convey all 3 elements.
I bet you also don’t say “14 07 1789”, because that’s what MM format means.
You bet wrong
We write AND say “La Révolution a démarré le 14/07/1789” or “La Révolution à démarré le 14 juillet 1789”
Spoken numbered month are usually used in an administrative context, to ease the work of our contact.
Oh that’s right, the spoken administrative context. Same in my dd-mm-yyyy county actually. Still, I find it less intuitive than the logical yyyy-mm-dd when understanding written text.
Fuckin wait until you hear how many feet are in a mile. You all should’ve waterboarded us harder while we were a young country.
FIvE tOMaToeS
We do that in Sweden as well. Our social security numbers are that plus 4 unique numbers. The beers I send out to stores have yyyy-mm-dd printed at the bottom.
So no more than 10 thousands of Swedes may get an SSN at the same day (or be born at the same day even 🤔)?
Hasn’t been a problem so far. I’m guessing maybe they will add numbers or use letters if it comes up. They recentled started doing that on license plates.
Iso date format. Anything to do with photos is best to have in this format at the start of the filename.
Iso date format. Anything
to do with photosis best to have in this format at the start of the filename.Fixt.
It also means that by default it’ll sort by newest
YYYY-MM-DD for everything digital, DD-MM-YYYY for everything IRL.
I propose the use of MYDYDM format. So, October 15, 2023 will be written as 121350. Just to make it as confusing as possible.
Welp. I need a bath now.
Amazing
We’re also unduly forgetting about truly little endian date format: DD/MM/YYYY, for instance 52/11/3202 for this Saturday
Also we could just sort the numbers and omit leading zeroes, that way we can save some space, the same date would be 1122235
YYYY-MM-DD for files, DD-MM-YYYY for normal use
Wtf why
Because for 99.99% of all situations, you’d already know what year and month it is, so the most readily available piece of information should be the day.
If you already know the year and month why write it. ISO or month day are the two most reasonable. You need to zoom in not give yourself a list of options and then randomly pick one later.
TBH, Japanese format makes sense when you use it to name files/directories, as sorting by “name” is equivalenti to sorting by “last modified”.
equivalenti
Love typos that force me to read comments with an Italian accent
I’m actually italian, lol, but that was a genuine typo.
Free upvotes for both of you
Until you need to work across centuries. Then it’s eating paste level.
