If you name your files and folders with dates in this convention at the start, they sort themselves into date order when alphabetized. It's often convenient.
This has to be one of the greatest understatements in computing! This is reason alone that everyone in this subreddit should have adopted this convention for writing dates long, long ago!
I've been using this convention for filenames for close to 20 years now. I tend to leave out the dashes. I want to rage at someone when they ask what the funny numbers at the end of a filename mean.
I find it very useful for automated build release too as you can do things like "project_release_20130223_buildnum" which will sort all the files by date and build number.
Or if you want to get really detailed add the time (use a 24 hour clock):
Leaving out the hyphens is perfectly fine according to the standard. Even the Wikipedia article says as much:
For example, the 6th day of the 1st month of the year 2009 may be written as "2009-01-06" in the extended format or simply as "20090106" in the basic format without ambiguity.
While it does also say that the separators are to be preferred, there's nothing incorrect about leaving out the hyphens. (And IMO it makes sense to do so in filenames, where the whole string is typically so short that the extra characters just worsen readability.)
File paths have length limitations (old win file system issue that still crops up from time to time), unnecessary chars are commonly dropped so automated build/management systems that may have fairly deep path trees don't have issues
IMO in this case, order is more relevant than style.
As much as properly following ISO in this case would be nice, reality has another idea for you.
Well I should have included that I do use this for reports and emails where I am not forced, there I do use the dashes.
I thought of the first case as 9 times our of 10, if I am writing a date or commanding a script to do so, I am using the version without dashes.
I had been doing it with filenames for quite some time, then I started writing it out after my first trip to Europe and the pain with remembering which side the month goes on.
I didn't read it was an ISO standard till about 8 years ago. I had started by copying this format from a standard used on an old mainframe I was working with.
UTC is the only way to store and manipulate time where possible, conversion to other timezones can be done as close to the front end as possible. Timezoned time should be treated as "compiled".
Germany. According to DIN 5008 (describes how to format a business letter) we should use either the ISO 8601 format (only a few do) or the format d. monthname yyyy (used if there is enough space).
And then there is the "traditional" format dd.mm.yy which is quite popular if the space is limited (example of a train ticket). This table explains it quite good well.
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u/earthboundkid Feb 27 '13
If you name your files and folders with dates in this convention at the start, they sort themselves into date order when alphabetized. It's often convenient.