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Date format in the English localization

Added by Brad Beattie over 15 years ago

Redmine unilaterally uses ISO 8601 for it's date input fields. However, a fair number of the translations use different representations. This gets especially confusing in the English translation as English speaking countries don't use the same format. In the current trunk, Redmine displays dates as MM/DD/YYYY, a common format in the United States of America. Note that Redmine.org uses ISO 8601 for its English users.

What would people think about modifying the en.yml translation to just use ISO 8601 as a compromise of consistency with the date input fields and international use?


Replies (4)

RE: Date format in the English localization - Added by Anonymous over 15 years ago

In our installation (we're in the UK too) dates are displayed as 1 Apr 2009 in issues and the repository history, and in edit boxes (such as new version and report) as 2009-04-01.

What would your change in en.yml do to the above? I'd rather for us, the date edit boxes obeyed our locale and displayed as 01-04-2009 but I'm happy with the current format of 2009-04-01 as there isn't any ambiguity when the year is the first element.

Cheers

Russell

RE: Date format in the English localization - Added by Brad Beattie over 15 years ago

Actually, I'm in Canada. ;)

Anywho, maybe the user preferences page could use both a language selector (already there) and a date/time format selector (shouldn't be too difficult). That would help localize based on wildly varying date formats even within individual countries.

RE: Date format in the English localization - Added by Anton Duzenko over 15 years ago

Is it too hard to look at how it is done in Windows?

There are English(US) and English(Australia) etc languages, each with its own date/time format

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RE: Date format in the English localization - Added by Brad Beattie over 15 years ago

The problem with that approach is that different formats are used within countries.

From wiki:

In spite of the Canadian Standards Association's adoption of the ISO 8601 format, the traditional European format of day-month-year, and the month-day-year style from the United States are also used. The European little-endian format (e.g. 31/12/2006) is especially prevalent in Quebec because of Quebec's cultural links to France. Canada Revenue and other federal departments support the ISO 8601 yyyy-mm-dd standard. In more casual use, the first two digits of the year are often omitted (e.g. 31/12/06), though that has caused further confusion starting with 1 January 2000, since such a date could be confused three ways instead of the previous two ways. For example, 01/02/03 could be British "1 February 2003", US "January 2, 2003"; or ISO "2001 February 3". Younger generations are exposed more to the ISO year-month-day and US month-day-year formats, particularly with the advent of computers and other digital technology. The international ISO 8601 standard for all-numeric dates, with the full year first, is always more clear than the other two because it's the only format free of ambiguity.

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