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Niki Tonsky

Okay Twitter, what type of date format is that???
17 April at 14:11 | Open on mastodon.online
22 comments
L3viathan

@nikitonsky maybe they initially thought Twitter wouldn't last a year and added this later?

17 April at 14:14 | Open on mastodon.social
Christian Tietze

@nikitonsky Bespoke multi-layered regex is my guess :)

(\s\d{4}) → year
(+\d{4}) → time zone

eaaaasy 😎

...

wait, what international standards?

17 April at 14:15 | Open on mastodon.social
Niki Tonsky

@ctietze I mean, I get RFC 822, but it’s 'Tue, 3 Jun 2008 11:05:30 GMT'

Why would you put year _after_ time zone???

17 April at 14:45 | Open on mastodon.online
Григорий Клюшников

(btw Mastodon API and ActivityPub also use strings for timestamps)
17 April at 14:47
Niki Tonsky

@grishka I don’t mind the string (what else would you use?) but the format itself. It resembles RFC 822, but year is for some reason _after_ time zone

17 April at 14:49 | Open on mastodon.online
Григорий Клюшников

Niki, unixtime, of course. A string can be malformed. A number can not, not without making the entire JSON invalid.

17 April at 15:26
iliazeus

@grishka ...but do you mean _true_ unixtime (i.e. in seconds), or Java/JavaScript "unixtime" (i.e. in milliseconds)?

@nikitonsky

17 April at 16:14 | Open on lor.sh
Григорий Клюшников

iliazeus, in most cases, true unixtime as a 64-bit integer. You usually don't need millisecond precision.

17 April at 16:18
iliazeus

@grishka so you're going against default conventions both in JVM (new Date(ms) and date.getTime()) and in JS (new Date(ms) and date.valueOf())? (possibly somewhere else, idk)

What I'm saying is, if picking a number-based timestamp format, I'd pick unixtime in milliseconds. I thing it would be the least surprising option.

@nikitonsky

17 April at 16:24 | Open on lor.sh
Григорий Клюшников

iliazeus, at least PHP's time() returns unixtime in seconds so there are examples of both.

17 April at 16:32
iliazeus

@grishka well, PHP's stdlib was basically starting as thin wrappers over C stdlib functions.

Python also has it in seconds, but it does this weird thing where its timestamps are floating-point.

C# seems to use 100-microsecond "ticks".

Go uses nanoseconds, iirc.

So yeah, it's even more ambiguous.

If I have a choice, I usually prefer ISO 8601 strings myself. They're standard, unambiguous, human-readable, and even sortable as strings.

@nikitonsky

17 April at 16:41 | Open on lor.sh
Григорий Клюшников

iliazeus, iirc it's also popular in binary file formats to store timestamps as unixtime in seconds.

17 April at 16:58
top.ofthe.top

PHP also has microtime(true)

19 April at 3:39 | Open on top.ofthe.top
Niki Tonsky

@grishka why would string be malformed but number wouldn’t?

17 April at 21:16 | Open on mastodon.online
Vincent Cantin
Sergey Sign

@nikitonsky
It is rfc822 from rails : )

17 April at 15:32 | Open on lor.sh
Niki Tonsky
Sergey Sign

@nikitonsky yes, my bad(

> This method is similar to the strftime() function defined in ISO C and POSIX.
17 April at 21:56 | Open on lor.sh
Sergey Sign

@nikitonsky
oops
'%+' is '%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y'
but you have '%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %z %Y'

17 April at 22:10 | Open on lor.sh
Sergey Sign

@nikitonsky I remembered a story about this format : )

stackoverflow.com/questions/25

> There is a package time format constant named RubyDate; it's a misnomer.

The Go authors were misled by Go Issue 518 which claimed that Ruby Time.now outputs Tue Jan 12 02:52:59 -0800 2010

Later, the issue was revised to say that Tue Jan 12 02:52:59 -0800 2010 was the date format used by the Twitter API. In the beginning, in the "Fail Whale" days, Twitter used Ruby-on-Rails, which may be why they assumed it was a Ruby date format.

@nikitonsky I remembered a story about this format : )

stackoverflow.com/questions/25

> There is a package time format constant named RubyDate; it's a misnomer.

The Go authors were misled by Go Issue 518 which claimed that Ruby Time.now outputs Tue Jan 12 02:52:59 -0800 2010
17 April at 23:53 | Open on lor.sh
dmitriid

@nikitonsky

Lol. They broke it again. It used to be non-RFC despite the docs a few years ago. Then they fixed it. And now theybroke it again. I can't even imagine *how* you can end up with this format

17 April at 16:17 | Open on mastodon.nu
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