Hacker News Reader

If you need to keep the timezone with it, then use an ISO8601 [0] string: "2021-11-11T15:32:35-07:00".

Otherwise, use an integer unix timestamp, the number of seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z: 1636673555. Use an unsigned 32-bit integer or a 64-bit integer to avoid the 2038 problem [1]. JSON's maximum safe integer value is a signed 53-bit integer, so if you're using HTTP JSON RPC, you'll have to check for overflow.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

ISO8601 is a serialisation format. You wouldn't want to use it in internal function calls simply for performance reasons. You also wouldn't want to pass it around as just a "string" type. I think the question was asking about internal function calls. For external data interchange, ISO8601 is the only sane option and deals with all known timezone and leap second bollocks.

Depends on the language but most high-level languages have a timestamp or datetime abstraction which you should be using.

If it's being serialized, consider fully qualified iso8601.