[TimK65]

So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.

[My_Name]

Can I just say that, as someone born and bred in the UK, YYYY-MM-DD is the only correct way to display a date wherever you live.

Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...

[reaperducer]

as someone born and bred in the UK, YYYY-MM-DD is the only correct way to display a date

Do you also address your mail to "United Kingdom, Scotland, Edinburgh;" or tell people, "I'm going on holiday to Croatia, Split?"

[LoveMortuus]

I do write Lisbon, Portugal, whenever I talk about where I live. Doesn't take much extra effort to provide more precision and avoids possible confusions.

[verzali]

You probably should, actually.

[pchangr]

TIL mm:hh is a thing o_O

[Pooge]

> Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...

Please tell me that's not a thing.

[tempodox]

Just look at your crontab, love.

[dhosek]

It is now.

[ben_w]

In a moment of whimsy I briefly considered a date format where digits were sorted alphabetically.

2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667

Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.

[card_zero]

Well that's just totally ambiguous. What you should do instead is treat the date as one long number and present its factors, for instance 2⁴⋅11⋅7649⋅15050023, much more practical.

[dhosek]

I rarely have cause to give people my phone number anymore, but I always like to give it as three billion, 128 million, …

[tremon]

That's not alphabetically, that's asciibetically. The alphabetical (English) sort would be something like ::--51176632222000

[rich_sasha]

How about just sort the numbers from biggest to smallest?

2026-07-02 16:45 becomes

2026-45-16-06-02

Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?

[btschaegg]

> Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?

I vote for "end of unit" (ASCII 0x1F).

[debesyla]

Wait, can this format be transformed back to the "normal" format? If so, then it could be kinda viable for some operations... :thinking_emoji:

[jstanley]

No, it can't be transformed back because it has lost information.

2025-06 and 2026-05 both have the same digits, for example.

[mkopinsky]

No, it's an unreversible hash function. I use this for passwords - no one will ever be able to figure out what ehntru2 was originally.

[ben_w]

No, because "12".sort_by_digits() == "21".sort_by_digits()

[SpaceNoodled]

Well it's a NUMBER

[ben_w]

https://imgur.com/gallery/phone-numbers-are-not-numbers-defi...

[bmacho]

Wrong decimal tho.

Why isn't there an en-EU or en-ISO locale that has:

  - yyyy-mm-dd
  - SI units
  - 1,234.56 number format

[aendruk]

It is possible to define a custom locale with these features, e.g. https://andrew.kvalhe.im/2022-09-09

  $ echo "$LANG"; date
  en_US.UTF-8@aspirational
  2026-07-02T11:17:00-07:00

[brnt]

The European Commission published its own language guide. In terms of English it's only a small deviation from en-GB, but my first thought was indeed: when can I set en-EU?

[reirob]

Do you have a link to this publication?

[bmacho]

https://knowledge-centre-translation-interpretation.ec.europ...

> This style guide is intended primarily for English-language authors and translators, both in-house and freelance, working for the European Commission.

It specifies formats for date, numbers etc.

[sph]

I can tolerate the comma as thousands separator, but I hate the dot as thousands separator. Use a space or ' if you want to be fancy.

I wish we’d rip the bandaid off and invent a new character that makes it unambiguous across the world.

[btschaegg]

Because that comma is a crime against legibility.

[pezezin]

Nowadays the recomended thousands separator by most international standards is a blank space.

And having been raised in the continent, I personally find using commas for thousands disgusting.

[marcellus23]

as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.

[SpaceNoodled]

This format is an American?

[WithinReason]

That's also the ISO standard since it sorts correctly

[rkangel]

I believe it's the ISO standard because it is obviously distinguishable from both the MM-DD-YY (US) date order and the DD-MM-YY (UK/EU/Others) date order and so is unambiguous.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

The fact that they are then sortable is a nice side benefit!

[anotherevan]

Although my (AU) locale is dd-mm-yyyy, I'll use yyyy-mm-dd anywhere I have to write a date in all numbers to avoid any ambiguity. It also has the advantage of sorting correctly in things like file names.

For something more likely to be read by a human and not parsed by a computer (and is not locale or i18n/l10n flexible) I'll use d mmm yyyy, e.g., 3 Jul 2026. To my thinking, for English speaking this is the friendliest unambiguous format (although I'm sure opinions will differ).

[TimK65]

"Friday 3 July 2026" (yes, I elected to spell out the month) also has the advantage of not requiring commas for legibility ("Friday, July 3, 2026" being common in the US).

[anotherevan]

Yeah, I'll add the abbreviated day ("Thu 3 Jul 2026") where it makes sense to.

[fmajid]

I've taken to using the Swedish locale for that very reason (French-American living in the UK).

[3836293648]

Vad himla pratar du om? ALLT använder dd/mm-yy. Jag har aldrig sett något på svenska som använder yyyy-mm-dd, det finns bara inte. Det finns i Sverige, men då är det också på engelska.

[TimK65]

"Vad himla pratar du om?"? I in my turn have never heard that expression before, so who's zoomin' who, baby?

[hk1337]

The superior date format. Superior to all others.