5 ms·

This is going to look like "oh typical HN shooting things down", but: Parses 13/4/2012 as: year: 2012 month: 13 day: 4

by eterm 11y ago

lubomir 11y ago
Also it does not consider 12:33 to be a time.
tonyblundell 11y ago
Yeah seems obvious, but I don't think it really makes sense to guess that it's a UK format date based on whether one of the numbers is bigger than 12. 4/5/2012 could be 4th May or 5th April and it would be impossible to tell programmatically. People really need to start using yyyy/mm/dd :-)
- gtf21 11y ago
  dd/mm/yyyy and yyyy/mm/dd are as valid as each other, since it proceeds in either increasing or decreasing unit size. Having dates as mm/dd/yyyy makes about as much logical sense as writing: 10492 as 49210.
  - tonyblundell 11y ago
    It doesn't make sense mathematically because it isn't a mathematical notation, it's linguistic in nature. In Europe, '4th May' is shortened to 4/5. In the US, 'May 4th' is shortened to 5/4. Neither is right, wrong or illogical. I'm from the UK, but have spent a lot of time working with US based clients/colleagues. They only way I've found to avoid confusion and ambiguity is to use YYYY/MM/DD.
    - gtf21 11y ago
      It still makes no sense to have MM/DD/YYYY.
- david-given 11y ago
  I live in Switzerland; I speak English (and a very slowly increasing amount of German). Switzerland uses DD.MM.YYYY almost exclusively (yes, with dots). I was filling in a web form using Google Translate. It took me several phone calls and about two weeks to sort out the problems caused when Translate back-converted some (but not all) of the dates that I'd entered into the form from DD.MM.YYYY to MM.DD.YYYY before submitting. /self rage
richmarr 11y ago
Not at all, it's a valid bug that's indicitaive of a deeper problem, presenting uncertain and locale-specific conclusions as being certain. Even if you do language and locale-sniffing using n-grams you still have a certainty problem. In the UK we traditionally use DD/MM/YY format, although since "9/11" the papers have started slipping into MM/DD format, and younger people have followed suit somewhat. In the UK it's therefore completely crazy to rely on NLP to interpret "6/7/12" which might mean 7th June or 6th July. If you're going to capture it you need to ask the user, so you need both.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  With that being said, it still needs to do sanity check. Is it a valid date? if not, will it be if we change the format? Nobody really knows what you mean when you write a data as xx/xx/xx. It has to be assumed from context. I've even have border control ask me about the expiration date of my passport since they couldn't figure out if it was day-month or month-day. I couldn't tell them either, because it wasn't written explicitly. Later I realised I could deduce it from my birthdate.
  - richmarr 11y ago
    Not to be overly inflamattory, but whoever designed that passport (an inherently international object) without taking into account international date format deserves to be fired. Then re-hired. Then fired again.

This is going to look like "oh typical HN shooting things down", but: Parses 13/4/2012 as: year: 2012 month: 13 day: 4

by eterm 11y ago

This is going to look like "oh typical HN shooting things down", but: Parses 13/4/2012 as: year: 2012 month: 13 day: 4

lubomir 11y ago

Also it does not consider 12:33 to be a time.

tonyblundell 11y ago

Yeah seems obvious, but I don't think it really makes sense to guess that it's a UK format date based on whether one of the numbers is bigger than 12. 4/5/2012 could be 4th May or 5th April and it would be impossible to tell programmatically. People really need to start using yyyy/mm/dd :-)

gtf21 11y ago
dd/mm/yyyy and yyyy/mm/dd are as valid as each other, since it proceeds in either increasing or decreasing unit size. Having dates as mm/dd/yyyy makes about as much logical sense as writing: 10492 as 49210.
- tonyblundell 11y ago
  It doesn't make sense mathematically because it isn't a mathematical notation, it's linguistic in nature. In Europe, '4th May' is shortened to 4/5. In the US, 'May 4th' is shortened to 5/4. Neither is right, wrong or illogical. I'm from the UK, but have spent a lot of time working with US based clients/colleagues. They only way I've found to avoid confusion and ambiguity is to use YYYY/MM/DD.
  - gtf21 11y ago
    It still makes no sense to have MM/DD/YYYY.
david-given 11y ago
I live in Switzerland; I speak English (and a very slowly increasing amount of German). Switzerland uses DD.MM.YYYY almost exclusively (yes, with dots). I was filling in a web form using Google Translate. It took me several phone calls and about two weeks to sort out the problems caused when Translate back-converted some (but not all) of the dates that I'd entered into the form from DD.MM.YYYY to MM.DD.YYYY before submitting. /self rage

richmarr 11y ago

Not at all, it's a valid bug that's indicitaive of a deeper problem, presenting uncertain and locale-specific conclusions as being certain. Even if you do language and locale-sniffing using n-grams you still have a certainty problem. In the UK we traditionally use DD/MM/YY format, although since "9/11" the papers have started slipping into MM/DD format, and younger people have followed suit somewhat. In the UK it's therefore completely crazy to rely on NLP to interpret "6/7/12" which might mean 7th June or 6th July. If you're going to capture it you need to ask the user, so you need both.

wodenokoto 11y ago
With that being said, it still needs to do sanity check. Is it a valid date? if not, will it be if we change the format? Nobody really knows what you mean when you write a data as xx/xx/xx. It has to be assumed from context. I've even have border control ask me about the expiration date of my passport since they couldn't figure out if it was day-month or month-day. I couldn't tell them either, because it wasn't written explicitly. Later I realised I could deduce it from my birthdate.
- richmarr 11y ago
  Not to be overly inflamattory, but whoever designed that passport (an inherently international object) without taking into account international date format deserves to be fired. Then re-hired. Then fired again.