2023-08-09.jpg

I'm definitely in the "for almost everything" camp. It's less ambiguous especially when you consider the DD/MM vs MM/DD nonsense between US dates vs elsewhere. Pretty much the only time I don't use ISO-8601 is when I'm using non-numeric month names like when saying a date out loud.

Yeah, it's pretty much everything for me too. The biggest exception being when UI is involved and a longhand date format would be more friendly.
- Friendly to who?
In Canada we use MM/DD and DD/MM so you never quite know which it is! There's an expense spreadsheet I fill out for work that uses one format in one place and the other format in another....
- Holy cats, that sounds like a nightmare.
- Hey, that sounds like my cloud storage providers auto billing system.
  “Your auto renewal will draft on 08/09/23.”
  Is that August 9th or September 8th? Literally depends on where the person you ask is in the world.
- That would ruin my entire day
And you can do a simple sort on the combined number and youve sorted by date.

Can't believe he missed the opportunity to add 41332 to the number of ways of how not to write dates.
- I must be missing something.
- They're trying to make it look fake!
I recall writing a script that produces that 01237 with smaller digits around it for the current date. It lists the numbers that occur in the date (0, 2, 3 and 9 for 2023-09-09), the smaller digits show at which position they show up in a YYYYMMDD format (the 0 shows up on positions 2, 5 and 7)
The script has not been pushed online cause it was so dang bad

ISO-8601 over all other formats. 2023-08-09T21:11:00Z

Simple, sortable, intuitive.

Awful to actually read, though. Using T as a delimiter is mental... At least the hyphen provides some white space
- Honestly, even a lowercase t.
- Why are you splitting and delimiting a date object? Convert it to a shallower object if that's what you need
- Using T as a delimiter is mental
  You get used to it.
Good luck using colons in a filename.
- Linux has been able to handle that since the 90s.
- Tough luck if you are using NTFS file system. All my homies use EXT4.
Too long. Even 2023-08-09 is too long for me. But since I like the readability I use 2023.08.09. Less pixels and more readable then 20230809.
- Same number of pixels, they are just different colours. But you still paid for them.
- Although I actually like that format a lot, we use characters to help elicit context. 2023/08/09 is fine since we have been using / for dates for so long. Also it blows my mind why people don’t use : in 24 hour times. 16:40 is great, no am pm bullshit and you immediately know I’m talking time.

ISO 8601 is always the correct way to format dates.

ISO 8601 is the only correct way to format timestamps.
The intersection of iso8601 and rfc3339.
https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

Christ, do this many people really find iso8601 hard to read? It’s the date and the time with a T in the middle.

Not "many people." Americans. Americans find it hard to read. I'm not 100% sure but I'm fairly certain everyone else in the world agrees that either day/month/year or year/month/day is the best way to clearly indicate a date. You know, because big to small. America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.
- I'm pretty sure it's because of the way we say it. Like, "May 6th, 2023". So we write it 5/6/2023.
  That said, I think it's fucking stupid.
- I am an American and I use it religiously for the record. Especially for version numbers. Major.minor.year.month.day.hour.minute-commit. It sorts easy, is specific, intuitive, and makes it clear which version you’re using/working on.
- America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.
  It's because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.
  America didn't change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.
  People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don't matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that's how speak the dates.
  I wouldn't say it is us Americans who "find it hard to read" if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.
  Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There's no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.
  But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let's talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.
- Day/month/year is not in the same category as y/m/d. That crap is so ambiguous. Is today August 9th? Or September 8th? Y/m/d to the rescue.
- Because who cares what day it is without knowing the month first.
I think it's fair that programmatic and human readable can be different. If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though
- If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though
  That way you can sort the months of the year, in order:
  April
  August
  December
  February
  January
  July
  June
  March
  May
  November
  September
I use it all the time when writing dates.
2023-08-09: just read from the end. 9th August 2023.
As long as they use letter for months, like Jul 09, 2013 its fine. Otherwise prefer a sorted timescale version. Either slow changing to fast changing yyyy mm dd or fast to slow dd mm yyyy.
- The letters make no sense to me. Like Jul, Jun, I'm constantly mixing them up. Give me a good solid number like 07 or 10. No mixing that up. Higher numbers come after lower numbers, simple as.
- Nah, letters bring another complexity - besides with them Feb gets sorted after Dec.
what

It warms my heart to see so many comments in the camp of "I use it everywhere". Absolutely same here. You are my people.

Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don't make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn't make any sense, and don't make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.
You never know when something might need to become a filename, so you might as well just use ISO 8601 for everything.

Upvoted because I appreciate the exposure for this dating method, but I personally use it for everything. Much clearer for a lot of reasons IMO. Biggest to smallest pretty much always makes the most sense.

I do too, even in notes at work or handwritten stuff at home. I don’t always need to be reminded of the year first, but sometimes it becomes important on older stuff.
Plus when you’re in the US and work with people from Europe, the unambiguous ordering of month and day is a nice safeguard against silly misunderstandings.
- ...and if I don't need the year, my eyes simply skip to the dash and continue to read from there.

ISO 8601 gang. You’d never want to describe dates that way but for file management the convenience is massive.

If you're using a *NIX command line, something like
mkdir $(date +%F)_photos
is super handy.
I do. Anything I have to put a datecode on, always gets a stamp of YYYYMMDD.
- That's not ISO8601

I use it everywhere too. Screw the naysayers
Not only visually satisfying, but also logically sound
Hell I use it in my diary. It just works
I wish we this for work.
Not on paper documents though. Here in Europe I have to write dd-mm-yyyy.

I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!

Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.

Hmmm more like 6 ways but I get your point
- Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).
  AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD... yet. Don't let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.
- Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.
- this guy does combinatorics
It's how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It's easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.
- Where is here that November = 9? Probably somewhere you've had a long day
- We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.
  When is your independence day, again?
  Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use "{ordinal} of {month}" (11th of August), "{ordinal} {month}" (11th August), and "{month} {ordinal}" (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use "{number} {month}" (11 August). That doesn't have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It's not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
- It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don't say it that way?
  Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.
- Saying it like that is no problem and not ambiguous. Writing it like that makes no sense though.
- I'm canadian and I've always prefered this format for the same reason. 11/6/23 is november 6th 2023, not the 11th of June 2023, that's weird.
Do people outside of the US not say dates like "June first" etc? M/D/Y matches that. It's really not weird at all, even if the international ambiguity is awful.
- In Danish, it's said like 1st of June.
- Flemish here (aka dutch-speaking). We say first June, sixth November etc. English isn't our native language, so M/D/Y is weird as fuck and completely illogical to us.
- Yes it is objectively weird.
  When you write down "07/01/1967" are you unaware that it is unclear whether you're referring to July 1st or January 7th?
  And despite the fact that you're writing something down for the express purpose of communicating information, and you're choosing to shorten it's written format to save time and space, you're ok with either
  a) just leaving it ambiguous and communicating poorly
  or
  b) having to write extra words to give it context, taking up more space than just writing out "July 1st, 1967"?
  1967/06/01 clearly communicates we're starting with the year and going biggest to smallest time increments. There is no ambiguity as to which order it's ever in, and it's far shorter than the full written date.
  At a fundamental user experience level, it is objectively nonsensical to choose the American date format when your goals are 1) clearly communicating a date and 2) doing it shorter than writing out the words.
- In Germany we say things like "we meet on the twelfth fifth" (Zwölfter Fünfter), which is the twelfth day of the fifth month. Often times the year is also shortened to only the last two digits, so it could be twelfth fifth twenty-four in dd-mm-yy format.
  Of course we also use the names of the months, but sometimes we just number them.

Nah man. Use 8601 for everything. They’re intrinsically chronologically sortable.

Or unix epoch time
- In a programmatic context? Sure.
  In an “I want to be able to comprehend this by glancing at it” context: absolutely not.
  2023-08-10 15:45:33-04:00 is WAY more human legible than 1691696733.

Nah, for everything.

- .

There are two ways of writting dates: the "yyyy-mm-dd" one and the wrong one

ISO 8601 ftw. Here's the date, time, and duration for our next meeting:
2023-08-10T20:00:00PT2H30M
- But where is a timezone?
- nearly forgot that 8601 has support for durations as well

better than the absolutely deranged MM/DD/YYYY and imo the best when it comes to international communication

I've been told " You don't say 6th June, do you?" too many times
- In the U.K. we do all the same. Sixth of June.
- The amusing thing is that in Swedish you definitely do. Or actually "6:e juni".
How the fuck does second largest to smallest to largest make any kind of sense?

ISO 8601 is amazing for data storage and standardizing the date.

Display purposes sure, whatever you feel like

But goddammit if you don’t use ISO 8601 to store dates, I will find you, and I will standardize your code.

epoch not acceptable then?
- Epoch is also acceptable if humans don't need to understand it
- I will agree it’s a valid storage but it has to be specified in ms
I actually need to standardize my code. I've got "learning F2" as something I want to do soon. The goal: use the exif data of my pictures to create [date in ISO 8601] - [original filename].[original file type termination]
So a picture taken the third of march 2022 titled "asdf.jpg" would become "2022-3-3 - asdf.jpg"
Help? lol
- If you're on Linux exiftool can get the creation date for you: exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' FILENAME, and you could run tgat in a loop over your files, something like:
  
  mkdir -p out for f in *.jpg do createdate=$(exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' "${f}") cp -p "${f}" "out/${createdate} - ${f}" done
  Obviously don't justbgo running code some stranger just posted on the internet, especially as I haven't tested it, but that should copy images from the current directory to a subdirectory called 'out' with the correct filenames.
- I did this in the past and I would search through my notes... If I had notes ffs.
- Can you give more context, what are you using? Language / system / etc?

YYYY-MM-DD for everything. My PC clock, my phone and even my handwritten notes all use that format.

The only other acceptable format is military notation: DD MMM YYYY.

That's quirky - how is there anything logical about the military time format?
- The 3 "M"s are not numerical, but indicate characters. For example 01 Jan 2023.
- It's written like 07 Aug 2013. It's consistent in character length, doesn't confuse internationals, doesn't take much space and is written exactly like being said around here. It's just not that great for file names.

I enforce ISO 8601 for the shared storage in my office. Before I got there, files were kinda stored in all kinds of formats, but mostly month first.

I tell the person under me she can store her files in her user any way she wants, but if it goes into shared storage, it's ISO 8601. I even have a folder in there called !Date format: YYYY-MM-DD Description to help anyone else remember.

Haha I did the same.
It was the Wild West, no standard, everyone used their own date format all in the same shared storage.
I've got most of the office doing it correctly now
Oh that's a good idea. Thx.

Excuse me?! ISO 8601 >> *

/c/ISO8601

- Why do you support centralization of Lemmy

ISO dates are the goat because they string compare correctly. Just yesterday I shaved 2 full seconds off a page transition by removing a date parse in the middle of a hot sorting loop. Everything should use ISO in my opinion.

Maybe we should form some sort of organization, on an international stage, dedicated to creating and maintaining such standards.

Now thats the kind of indoctrination of children I can get behind
It's ISO8601

Leave them hyphens out though, 20230809

I have a watch that uses MM/DD for date, which pissed me off to no end. While looking for a way to change it to DD/MM, I found out that they actually used ISO-8601 and dropped the year. Now I don't know how to feel about it.

If they dropped the year it's no longer an ISO date.
- ISO 8601 has spec for how to drop the year. You write it like --MM-DD (two dashes to indicate omission). Of course nobody really uses it beside the absolute nerds (e.g. me).

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/iso_8601_2x.png

Link: https://xkcd.com/1179/

Preach!

To the commenters justifying the written form MM-DD-YYYY on the basis of preferring to say the name of the month followed by the day (which the written numerical sequence does not preclude you from doing). If someone were to say something like "the time is a quarter to eleven" do you think they would have a case for writing it 45:10? And if so, how would you deal with the ambiguity of "ten past ten" if they wrote it 10:10 instead of 10:10?

This guy's throwing wrenches into engines

I like yyyy-mm-dd and dd/mm/yyyy

eww not ddmmyyyy
- Go largest to smallest or smallest to largest. Not medium, small, large.

YYMMDD is how a start my file names. It'll work great for another 75 years or so.

Then you just move everything into a new "20" folder.
- So your saying to name files
  YY/yy/MM/DD/file_name.jpg
Found the guy who was born after the year 2000
- Way off

yyyy-mm-dd makes it much clearer about what fucking order things are in

Yeah if the day of the month is less than 12 and any other format is used it becomes a guessing game.

10 Aug 2023 is the superior format for handwritten dates, no misinterpretation of the date itself or an improperly written divider.

I'm a systems guy. ISO8601 or die. Whomever decided to put the most significant digits at the end of MMDDYYYY can get fired. From a cannon. Into the sun.

Use YYYY-DD-MM for pure chaos.

DD-YYYY-MM
- Let's just go with DDDDDD; the number of days since 1/1/1 C.E. So, today is 738742.

When I try to enter a date in excel and it formats it as numerical 424523 or some shit smh

Makes a lot more sense as it gets easy to sort files that way.

Tab completion approves of this naming scheme.

Unix epoch for life! 😂

Gotta love well sorted items.

I find that it's better than confusing month and day and going insane when dealing with both American and Bri'ish clients

Year-Month-Day best everywhere

I always have written my dates this way. It's one of those things that always seemed weird to me and then when I realize that only in America do we write our dates MM-DD-YYYY /facepalm

YYYY-DD-MM is some unintuitive shit.

I refuse to believe anyone does this. I think the inconsistency comes down to how people speak. "The meeting will be held on the 10th of January 2023" = 10/01/2023 but "January 10, 2023" = 01/10/2023.
I don't know how you would have to torture your brain for it to feel at home with YYYY-DD-MM.

The dashes waste space. You'll know what 20230809 means in context.

Wrote it on another comment, this way it loses human-readable a bit.
I saw these with hh:mm:ss all without keystrokes. That's the worst.
i've seen some software use . although that's less human-readable than -. i hope you still use 8.3 naming on everything if you're complaining about two hyphens.

Lot of talk of numerics only. The problem there is knowing what format the information is in since clearly there are 3 possibilities. Without context and during certain parts of the month you're hosed. Best to remove ambiguity and go with the alpha numeric format.

DD MMM YY (or alternatively YYYY)

11 Aug 2023

Ambiguity gone.

23 Aug 23. Ya, no ambiguity. /s
2023-08-23 is the way.
- Any date format can be unambiguous as long as it's the one that everyone agrees on, and all date formats will be ambiguous as long as we have several in use.
  I kinda gave up, nowadays when i write a date to someone i specify the date format. Like i will send "01/05/2024 (DD/MM/YYYY)" because it's the only way to be sure
The second reason why yyyy-MM-dd is the correct way to write days (beside being sortable by default) is because even Americans doesn't have any similar format that it can be confused with.
I learned this in my first half year as a programmer I think, somewhere well over a decade back and so far it seems that guy was right.
- As monsterous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because...well...yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
There's no amibuity with year first and done properly like YYYY-MM-DD.
Your reasoning is that the ambiguity exists due to using numbers. The ambiguity is only for 2/3 numerical methods
- As monstrous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because...well...yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
Problem is that languages get in the way. Some are pretty similar like 15 ago (Spanish) being 15 Aug (English), but 1 ene (Spanish) aren't that similar to 1 Jan (English).
And for the usual "But English is used everwhere! I live in X!" crowd: NO, it isn't. Not everything you see as an "expat" is the same as the actual locals with their own language.

Directories exist for a reason

Seeing as I do a lot of AV editing I use this format to keep track of Audio files I do production on. YYYYMMDD Filename Version. It's often a case of working on a file and coming back to it weeks or months later, and in most cases there are multiple versions and revisions as I collaborate with my production partner.

It helps me keep track of the timeframe, what it is and which version so I can ensure rendered versions I'm using in other directories or as assets in other files are consistent and up to date.

The directories got quite messy and confusing initially until I adopted the ISO date format for this case.

in most cases there are multiple versions and revisions as I collaborate with my production partner.
Y'all MFs need version control.

This is me but without the dashes. Haha I know l, what’s wrong with me..

But I’ve also started using 10/Aug in emails to make things crystal clear.

Anyway.

Everyone talks big game about the file names but forget how important standardizing on log time stamps is too. When I’m able to pipe a bunch of logs into sort, I get so happy.

Yeah, exactly, it's always a pita to pipe stuff through sed/awk to reformat the timestamps

No love for DD-YYYY-MM?

Think about what that would do in a filesystem...
It's great for handwritten notes or single bits of information, but for a dataset spanning a period of time it makes no sense
Why would you ever not put the month next to the day
Wait are you serious?

        filename.`date +%s`

join south africa and (sorta) japan, use YYYY-MM-DD as a default - sorts well, zero ambiguity.. at least until some joker starts popularising YYYY-DD-MM, anyway

This is big pp idea and I like it.

Facts. The sorting system for files inevitably makes YYYY-MM-DD more optimal. I tried to resist but it doesn't work.

The only way to organize my Grateful Dead shows

For speaking or writing it out going month then day feels natural, although I know it’s a regional thing. If you’re going number format, it should always go smallest to largest (DD-MM-YYYY) or largest to smallest (YYYY-MM-DD). For file names, definitely the latter so you can sort by alphabetical and everything is in order.

For speaking or writing it out going month then day feels natural
Yes, of course. Go to google translate and type in october 2nd 2023. Change the target language.
Yes, yes. Feet, miles, liquid miles, solid football fields and other nonsense also feels natural.
- As an American Engineer, the US measurement system disgusts me. The rest of the world uses SI, but my entire industry (and most of the US) uses the English system still and I absolutely hate it. Converting from ft to inches, or BTUs and tons, cubic feet, etc. Our lazy asses haven't joined the rest of the world yet. I wish we would just force the change and get over it
- 2nd of October seems the same as intuitive as October 2nd to me.
  For whatever reason, I know that one mile is 1760 yards or 5280 feet, but difficulty comes when doing anything with those numbers (e.g. How many yards in 5.2 miles? How many meters in 5.2 km? One is definitely easier to do). Maybe my chosen vocation of Engineering means I encounter unit conversions more frequently than most people. I dislike the weird combination of gauge vs 1/xths of an inch that pops up time to time (drill and screw diameters). I don't see how one mile is more intuitive than one kilometre as a distance.
  I'm not sure about the meter vs yard, they are almost the same in terms of intuitiveness as well as actual value.
  I just took a measurement of my fingers and my little finger nail is about a cm wide and my foreknuckle and index knuckle separation is about an inch.
  I use inches in wargaming because I grew up with warhammer miniatures which classically come on 25 mm bases, though they're switching to 30 mm to increase the size of infantry miniatures. At a certain point there's a balance between battlefield resolution and readability, which 25 mm bases seem fine for.
  Weights are even more baffling. I think I know what an ounce is, but I hate trying to multiply it out when Americans say something is 14 ounces or something.
  I know what pints are because of beer.
  Temperature is annoying for both because you have to find the little symbol not present on my keyboard.

where is the Americans text

I'm a firm believer of 01 Jan 2023 for everything else

I’ve always used it for everything

I feel like you answered the wrong post...

I apply it violently. It's like my boxing bag.

I don't just to piss you off, yes you ..

Look at this amateur wasting keystrokes on dashes

Understandable, but the keystrokes are helpful for human readable. I always have the "Suspicions Fry eyes" when I want to read 20230809 in a lot of files.
My Autohotkey does this when I type

.tod

What? I haven't been sorting by file names since mid 00s. Every file system I've used has the ability to sort by whatever I like

What if you create a file that has information related to a date that the file wasn't created on?
For example, you write a report about an event that happened two weeks ago. Now the created and modified metadata is tied to today's date, not the date two weeks ago.
- I usually give file names a human readable name like "report on the event 27.7.1994". Makes it easier for other people to understand if I need to pass the file on.
  For images I keep the original file name when I store it in a database (Capture one/Lightroom/etc) in folders by the year and then month they are taken: 2023 --> 08 and so on. If I eksport images for a specific project, I will keep the original file name but add project name and give it a number based on sequence. Everything else is in the metadata

MM-DD-YYYY is the only way. I can't stand the way you Europeans do it.

But if they day is less than 12 you have no way of verifying it's not supposed to actually be DD-MM-YYYY, plus sorting by date is all fucked if you don't put year first...
I'm american and disgusted

Nah MMDDYY for me fam

You are objectively wrong.
- Yes, MM DD YY only makes sense when you're speaking.
  In written language it should always follow the order of smallest to largest, meaning day, month, and then year. Imo.
  Though I personally try to use YYYY-MM-DD as much as possible in day to day life, if not applicable I use DD MM YYYY. YYYY-MM-DD of course doesn't follow the order of smallest to largest, instead following the opposite order, though at least it has an order.
- It turns out I can label my files any way I like, thanks.
I'm the same in my heart, but my brain says YYYYMMDD