Is it more common to use the mm/dd/yyyy format (01/13/2013 for today’s date) or m/d/yyyy (1/13/2013)? I’m getting conflicting information from Wikipedia (Date and time notation in the United States, Date format by country) and other sites such as Microsoft’s National Language Support reference. Many applications I have used, such as Dropbox and Google Calendar omit leading zeroes in numerical dates. OTOH, this board uses mm-dd-yyyy, with leading zeroes.
So I guess the answer is that both formats are employed, but which if either is more usual?
I always use yyyy/mm/dd (2013/01/13), just in case I have to sort anything. And yes, I use leading zeroes. I don’t know what’s more “usual,” but this works for me.
I can’t say which is “usual,” but if the date is always the same number of characters, in the same format, it makes searching a lot easier.
Example: Assuming I store files as MM-DD-YY, I can search for my December 2009 video files (as I did recently) with a wild card of "12-??-09*.mpg. It would be a lot more difficult otherwise.
I use leading zeroes, but that’s just because I do. I’ve noticed when filling out forms online, they request both digits for the month and day, but it’s pretty obvious why they do it that way. In writing, though, I really can’t say which is more common. I think without the leading zeroes is slightly more common, but it’s entirely possible I’m making that up. They’re both so common that I don’t even notice the formatting either way.
Leading zeroes help when doing a sort of alphanumeric data, otherwise, a date of 1, 1, 2013 will proceed a date of 11, 1, 2012. However, 01, 01, 2013 will follow 11, 01, 2012.
I don’t listen to U.S. radio very often, but a few years ago I did. In the ridiculously compressed paragraph at the end of car-dealer commercials, they typically said the 2000-dollar rebate ended on “seven thirty-one oh-nine” (7/31/09). It made me cringe, but that’s what they said.
So the month and day are not padded, but the year is… only up to 2 miserable digits.
It’s also been my experience in dealing with most of our English-speaking customers, both in the U.S. and Canada.
When I do spreadsheets solely for my own personal private use, I use a kind of “Stardate” format – yyyymm.dd – it sorts very nicely. It also looks good in columns.
(Obviously, at the workplace, I’m constrained by the company format book.)
For databases, filenames, and other electronic purposes: yyyy/mm/dd, because it makes searching by date a lot easier. Most databases require two digits in the month and day fields. I also use it for filenames because (as above) alphanumeric order matches chronological order.
Signing my name and date to a contract or other document, I write m/d/yyyy, since that’s the format most commonly expected, and there’s no database that needs leading zeros for sorting.
In a letter or other correspondence, I usually use “5 September 2012.”
Back when we used to write with pens, pencils, and typewriters, before we all got computerized, nobody ever wrote leading zeros in dates. What would have been the point? It looks bizarre and ugly in ordinary noncomputerized writing. But if people are now writing leading zeros habitually (even when not required to), that’s a sign of humans beginning to serve the machines instead of vice versa. First step on the way to the Matrix.
I say that including leading zeros is more common than not, but in hand-written examples it’s rarely ever done. For example, if I were going go to write a check today I’d put the date as 1/14/2013. I wouldn’t include the 0 in front of the 1. But if I were going to name a file with today’s date in it I would name it 2013_01_14_filename. So I’d say on computers the leading zero is more common, but when writing dates by hand it’s not so common.
Ha. Yes, this. A lot of posts to this thread are about why it’s wiser to use leading zeroes for spreadsheets and databases, which is fair enough, but that doesn’t mean that’s the most common thing to come across in writing. In just plain written text, whether hand-written or typed, that isn’t going to be catalogued or sorted, I’ve found both formats to be common, but I believe the leading zeroes are dropped more often than not.
Yes, although I gave a lot of computery examples in the OP I was thinking as much of how people would write numeric dates in real life, so to speak. I’m working on something involving dates and I didn’t want people to say “Are you crazy? Nobody writes dates like that.”
Like several others above, I’ve taken to using the YYYY/MM/DD format, with leading zeroes in the MM and DD if required. And the full 4-digit year.
Since I sometimes need to address mixed (US/European) lists of readers, I do this in all correspondence now, not only in file names, data, etc. that may end up being sorted, as it eliminates the inherent ambiguity of 5/7/11 (WTF is that date anyway… .)
They’re both commonly used, but if I had to choose, I’d ditch the zeroes. But whichever format you use, please rest assured no one is going to go “Dude, nobody writes that way.”
I don’t think it will be long before the majority of computer applications no longer care about specific formats and are able to deal with all the varieties as well as humans.
Except for cases where the programmer defines the Date field as being of type “String” (or VARCHAR or…). Which is way too many.
And not only in legacy code, either :rolleyes:
I don’t object to leading zeros when it’s computer-necessary; on computer I habitually use yyyy/mm/dd, even when typing in freetext, like when naming files or entering the access date for online references in Wikipedia. Because it works better that way; it’s the only simple way to sort dates. Sometimes one chooses between aesthetics and engineering. I want to make my real life in the real world be pretty. But when I’m on computer, I just want the dang thing to work! You could say, pacé McLuhan, the medium is the format.
You just need patience. It will come. Plenty of legacy code will never be revamped, but it takes time to get new practices in place. Some applications will auto-detect date format on input, but then you still have to know the standard format for queries. Some apps allow user defined display format of dates but many don’t bother with those niceties. It’ll get there.
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