So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.
Anything else is as bad as using mm:hh...
Please tell me that's not a thing.
2026-07-02-16-31-52 -> -----00011222235667
Hopefully it will remain a nonsense and never be seen in the wild, unlike the phone number field which I found on a real website which responded to scroll events to increase and decrease the value it contained.
2025-06 and 2026-05 both have the same digits, for example.
In fact, the first time I signed up for my own line, it happened unintentionally, and it was only after Pacific Bell had installed the line that I figured out it spelled something, and I informed my father and it was hilarious (the spelling was "BUG-BLOW").
Reminds me of when I tell Siri, "Play 2-G-B Sydney" and she responds, "Now playing two gigabytes."
2026-07-02 16:45 becomes
2026-45-16-06-02
Bonus points for using a very confusing separator... Maybe {?
I vote for "end of unit" (ASCII 0x1F).
Do you also address your mail to "United Kingdom, Scotland, Edinburgh;" or tell people, "I'm going on holiday to Croatia, Split?"
Why isn't there an en-EU or en-ISO locale that has:
- yyyy-mm-dd
- SI units
- 1,234.56 number format> This style guide is intended primarily for English-language authors and translators, both in-house and freelance, working for the European Commission.
It specifies formats for date, numbers etc.
$ echo "$LANG"; date
en_US.UTF-8@aspirational
2026-07-02T11:17:00-07:00And having been raised in the continent, I personally find using commas for thousands disgusting.
I wish we’d rip the bandaid off and invent a new character that makes it unambiguous across the world.
https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
The fact that they are then sortable is a nice side benefit!
For something more likely to be read by a human and not parsed by a computer (and is not locale or i18n/l10n flexible) I'll use d mmm yyyy, e.g., 3 Jul 2026. To my thinking, for English speaking this is the friendliest unambiguous format (although I'm sure opinions will differ).