• ISO 8601 is paywalled
  • RFC allows a space instead of a T (e.g. 2020-12-09 16:09:…) which is nicer to read.
  • @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
    88•1 year ago

    Top post of the hour is about an RFC from >20 years ago.

    This is worse than the Linux stuff.

    Y’all a bunch of nerds

  • @rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52•1 year ago

    You’ve just become the nemesis of the entire unix-like userbase for praising the space.

      • @rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        30•1 year ago

        On the command line, space is what separates each argument. If a path contains a space, you either have to quote the entire path, or use an escape character (e.g. the \ character in most shells, the backtick in Powershell because Microsoft is weird, or the character’s hexadecimal value), otherwise the path will be passed to the command as separate arguments. For example, cat hello world.txt would try to print the files hello and world.txt.

        It is a good practice to minimize the character set used by filenames, and best to only use English alphanumeric characters and certain symbols like -, _, and .. Non-printable characters (like the lower half of ASCII), weird diacritics (like ő or ű), ligatures, or any characters that could be misinterpreted by a program should be avoided.

        This is why byte-safe encodings, like base64 or percent-encoding, are important. Transmitting data directly as text runs the risk of mangling the characters because some program misinterpreted them.

        • silly goose meekah
          4•1 year ago

          but what does the command line matter for dates? sure every once in a while you’ll have to pass a date as an argument on the command line but I think usually that kind of data is handled by APIs without human intervention, so once these are set up properly, I don’t see the problem

          • @rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
            13•1 year ago
            rsync -a "somedir" "somedir_backup_$(date)"

            If the date command returns an RFC-3339-formatted string, the filename will contain a space. If, for example, you want to iterate over the files using for d in $(find...) and forget to set $IFS properly, it can cause issues.

            • @calcopiritus@lemmy.world
              1•1 year ago

              Both arguments are surrounded by ", which should be space-safe.

              At least in the shells I use, putting " makes spaces inside paths a non-issue.

              • @rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                For the rsync command, yes. But this:

                for d in $(find . -type d); do
    echo "$d"
done

                will process the space-separated parts of each path as separate items. I had to work around this issue just two days ago, it’s an obscure thing that not everyone will keep in mind.

              • @rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
                7•1 year ago

                Again, it’s not just CLI, it’s an insurance against misinterpreted characters breaking programs.

    • @Knusper@feddit.de
      2•1 year ago

      I’m not exactly fond of the space either, but man, the T is noisy. They could’ve gone with an underscore or something, so it actually looks like two different sections.

    • @CallumWells@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      allows, not requires. It basically means you can use space instead of T when showing it to end users and any technical person can just use T

      • @hyperhopper@lemmy.world
        10•1 year ago

        This is the most junior developer comment I’ve seen in a while.

        Nobody that’s competent thinks that’s shit is hard. That’s not the point.

        The point is, it makes it easy to make mistakes. Somebody might see all of one type of strings, assume that’s the format, and forget to enclose the thing in quotes, causing mysterious bugs years later when a differently created date filters into the system. You might have a regex error, you might split incorrectly, you might make a query that works the wrong way and gives an incorrect aggregate, and none of that is due to lack of skill. It’s due to not knowing it’s the rfc standard, not the iso. It could be due to not even realizing the rfc allows for that or is different.

        Software engineering in practice is not about making sure there is at least some way for people to use your library/standard/pattern. It’s about making sure the way to do it that’s most intuitive/obvious is also foolproof, easy, and efficient. Adding the space makes debugging harder and adds footguns which is exactly what good software engineers want to stay away from. Otherwise we’d all be writing in assembly. But since you aren’t, maybe you are the one with a skill issue. Either that or you really misunderstand this field.

  • @TeckFire@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31•1 year ago

    The difference:

    2023-12-12T21:18Z is ISO 8601 format

    2023-12-12 21:18 is RFC 3339 Format

    A small change

    • @hyperhopper@lemmy.world
      4•1 year ago

      I definitely don’t agree that the RFC is easier to read, the two numbers can appear to be one at a quick glance without a separator.

      • @elauso@feddit.de
        13•1 year ago

        But there is a separator between the numbers: the same one that also very reliably separates the words in this comment

        • @hyperhopper@lemmy.world
          1•1 year ago
          1. A single separator is better than a choice of separators to mean the same thing.
          2. A space is not as apparent in a large log of data as a capital T
          3. Human language is not as strict as a programming language. There is a reason you see people still using “alot” and “a lot”. That just proves it’s easy to overlook and commonly happens.
  • kingthrillgore
    26•1 year ago

    Its funny because everything about ISO 8601 is covered on its Wikipedia article. Very few people need to spend the francs to need the spec.

    • K4mpfie
      6•1 year ago

      If you want to be compliant for a standard you need to have a copy of it. Luckily it’s only companies that really need to buy them

      • @SirQuackTheDuck@lemmy.world
        6•1 year ago

        Which means the companies using the specs pay the company making the specs for everyone (companies and people) to use.

        That sounds fair, but I wouldn’t be surprised if capitalism fucked it up anyhow.

  • Anna
    24•1 year ago

    Yeah I like a girl who is firm on her choice of date time format…😂😂😂😂

    • @flambonkscious@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      This is about the old argument around how date strings are formatted.

      MMDDYYYY vs YYYYMMDD, spaces or hyphens may differ. It’s an old and passionate argument (mostly due to the American approach of starting with the month being insane)

      • @zik@lemmy.world
        18•1 year ago

        Both ISO8601 and RFC3339 are YYYY-MM-DD. The difference is in how the date and time are separated.

        • @somenonewho@feddit.de
          1•1 year ago

          That’s a certain kind of skill I wouldn’t want the need to have. I just copy paste those timestamps into a terminal with date -d @ (and always forget the right syntax for that :D)

    • Dr. DabblesEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      ISO standards need to be purchased to be viewed, RFCs are freely available requests for comment. The RFC 3339 format is effectively the same is the ISO format, except RFC 3339 allows for a space between the date and time components whereas the ISO format uses a “T” character to separate date and time components.

      If you want to get real weird, RFCs are not standards but rather a request for other participants to comment on the proposal. RFCs tend to be pointed towards as de facto standards though, even before they become a BCP or STD.

      • @Pratai@lemmy.world
        1•1 year ago

        Yeah… I have no idea what any of that means either. I’m sorry I caused you to write all that out.

    • @32b99410_da5b@lemmy.world
      1•1 year ago

      No?

      In ISO 8601:2004 it was permitted to omit the “T” character by mutual agreement as in “200704051430”, but this provision was removed in ISO 8601-1:2019. Separating date and time parts with other characters such as space is not allowed in ISO 8601, but allowed in its profile RFC 3339.