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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy, so if you encounter a date in that format, it is safe to assume dd.mm.yyyy.

Contrast this with the slash or dash notation, where both mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy are prevalent in the world. But 2020-08-06 is unambiguous in the same way that 06.08.2020 is: the only convention in common use is yyyy-mm-dd.

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> There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy

While slash is the most common, use of hyphens and dots as separators for US-style dates is not at all unheard of in the wild for manually formatted dates. The fact that it doesn't show up in lists of national “preferred formats” and doesn't tend to be commonly implemented as a prebaked format in software doesn't mean it's not a real thing people see and will interpret dates they see in light of.

How is that safe to assume??? You can't assume anything, why not ask the source of the data? The other way is to attempt to confirm which order by looking for first 2 digits > 12, but that info might not be available depending on the data.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true in Canada. MDY is very common, especially in the English parts. See:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

MDY separated by dots? The link you gave does not seem to support that.

Separating dates with dots (DD.MM.YYYY) is what’s taught in school in Germany.

So, yeah, there is a convention to write dates exactly that way.

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