ISO 8601 Date and time format and its usage

SO 8601 is an international standard that was issued by International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The first version of the standard was published in 1988. It combined and replaced some outdated ISO standards which were being used for time and date representation.

ISO 8601 describes time and date formats. The standard is particularly useful when transferring data between countries. ISO 8601provides an unambiguous representation of time. For example, each date can represented in different ways: 20/02/20 or February 20, 2020. This can present a business problem - especially for those spheres that concern organization of business meetings and supply chains.

ISO 8601 standard have the following format when used internationally: YYYY-MM-DD. In this case, any date, for example, February 20, 2020, will be represented as: 2020-02-20. First comes the year, then the month, and lastly - the day.

ISO 8601

The full version of ISO 8601 standard has the following information:

  • Date.
  • Local time adjusted for UTC.
  • UTC time.
  • Time of day.
  • Recurring time intervals.
  • Date and time.

ISO 8601 standard is used in programming , for instance, when writing code in the PHP language. It is needed so the time in the programm, application and on the website is represented in the international standard. This is particularly true for the international projects.

ISO 8601 has another variant, that is hhmm. This is time format mask. The time can be represented as 1536. On the website page or in the program interface the time will be displayed in the following way: 15 hours 36 minutes.

It can be complemented with the seconds. In order to do this the time should be represented in the hhmmss fromat, ss meaning seconds. They are represented in a two-digit format - 153622. It means that the clocks show 15 hours 36 minutes 22 seconds.