Top Document: [sci.astro] Time (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (3/9) Previous Document: C.00 Time, Calendars, and Terrestrial Phenomena Next Document: C.02 What are all those different kinds of time? See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge The international standard date notation is: YYYY-MM-DD For example, February 4, 1995 is written as 1995-02-04. This notation is standardized in International Standard ISO 8601. For more details regarding this standard, please <URL:http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html>. Other commonly used notations are e.g., 2/4/95, 4/2/95, 4.2.1995, 04-FEB-1995, 4-February-1995, and many more. Especially the first two examples are dangerous, because as both are used quite often and can not be distinguished, it is unclear whether 2/4/95 means 1995-04-02 or 1995-02-04. Advantages of the ISO standard date notation are: - easily parsed by software (no 'JAN', 'FEB', ... table necessary) - easily sortable with a trivial string compare - language independent - can not be confused with other popular date notations - consistent with 24h time notation hh:mm:ss which comes also with the most significant component first and is consequently also easily sortable (e.g., write 1999-12-31 23:59:59). - short and has constant length (makes keyboard data entry easier) - identical to the Chinese date notation, so the largest cultural group (>25%) on this planet is already familiar with it. - 4-digit year representation avoids overflow problems after 1999-12-31. In shell scripts, use date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" in order to print the date and time in ISO format. In C, use the string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" as the format specifier for strftime(). Other useful information on the ISO standard is at <URL: http://dmoz.org/Science/Reference/Standards/Individual_Standards/ISO_8601/ >. User Contributions:Top Document: [sci.astro] Time (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (3/9) Previous Document: C.00 Time, Calendars, and Terrestrial Phenomena Next Document: C.02 What are all those different kinds of time? Part0 - Part1 - Part2 - Part3 - Part4 - Part5 - Part6 - Part7 - Part8 - Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: jlazio@patriot.net
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:11 PM
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