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THIS! Not having a defined Date format has caused so much confusion with consumers of our API since every json API might have a different ISO date format (or so

THIS! Not having a defined Date format has caused so much confusion with consumers of our API since every json API might have a different ISO date format (or some homegrown madness).

eyelidlessness 7y ago
In APIs I've integrated in recent years, I've seen: 1. ISO UTC 2. ISO local 3. Epoch 4. 2018-04-20 5. Jan 01 2016 11:58am Probably others that I can't recall. It's a damn mess.
- anamexis 7y ago
  To be fair, 1, 2 and 4 are all just ISO.
  - eyelidlessness 7y ago
    That's true. But 2 is substantially less useful than 1 and I encountered 4 mixed with 3.
- Jestar342 7y ago
  `/Date(1234567890)/` That will probably cause a twitch to any dev that used Asp.NET up until a few years ago.
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    I’m twitching away...
  - eyelidlessness 7y ago
    Wow :(
  - srgpqt 7y ago
    I had to deal with that two weeks ago. Cringe.
- clon 7y ago
  PHP-s strtotime() will probably handle them all, even though it will make you cringe a bit. I never understood why simple integer unix timestamps are not more prevalent in API-s? Or some monotonic count from any reasonable epoch, depending on the context. How many APIs really have to ever return dates predating unix?