• 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
    478·
    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
    291·
    1 year ago

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

      • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        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@lemmy.world
          31·
          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
            7·
            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.

  • TeckFire@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    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
      52·
      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.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
    16·
    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.

  • Anna@lemmy.ml
    131·
    1 year ago

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

    • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      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.

  • CetaceanNeeded@lemmy.world
    31·
    1 year ago

    How could it be paywalled? I’ve never heard of anyone paying ISO to be able to write the date and time in a handy way.

      • MellowSnow@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Am programmer. Idk wtf that is. But if it converts easily to a datetime object, or if I can easily parse the parts out of it, I’m all for it. Idgaf if it’s easy to read as-is. Just make it efficient and make it sort predictably, and I’m all for it lol.