Re: Date processing should be more flexible

On Jul 4, 2005, at 5:04 AM, Erik Huelsmann wrote:

> On 7/4/05, McKenna, Simon (RGH) <Simon.McKenna@rgh.sa.gov.au> wrote:
>
>> -> What's meant with 2005/05/07 - July 5th or May 7th?
>>
>> yyyy/mm/dd
>>
>
> That's not the natural order for people in the US (as I understand
> it).

That's the ONLY *natural* order. Larger units to the left, as others
have pointed out.

With the 4 digit year it is also the least ambiguous. That is one
reason that it was chosen as the international standard for writing
the date numerically.

> ISO requires the '-' character.

I don't think it does, perhaps it is a recommendation, but I don't
think it is a requirement of the standard. A space is allowed as the
separator for sure. I think no separator at all is allowed as well.
I'm not sure if they even go so far as to explicitly require any
particular set of separators. Do they actually exclude the slash '/'
specifically? It's been a while since I have read the standard.

As far as parsing it goes, ANY non-numeric character can be treated
as a separator, regardless of whether it meets the ISO standard or
not. If no separators are found and the number is 8 digits then the
month and day fields can be inferred by position alone.

Scott

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Received on Mon Jul 4 15:19:51 2005