Date format in CSV should be ISO#144
Hello,
When I download a csv, such as transactions for a loan, the date column is in American format. Please always provide dates in the only unambigous format YYYY-MM-DD.
Many thanks.
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback! The format should automatically adjust based on your locale settings, which are provided by your browser. For example, if you’re using Chrome, you can change your locale settings by going to chrome://settings/languages.
Let me know if you need any further assistance!
Best,
Liz
Hi,
My browser is set to English out of the box, that doesn’t mean I want to my financial downloads to use American dates. I’m Swedish, I’m guessing you’re Swedish, but we still use English on this page.
Windows, Mac, Chrome, Firefox, are all initially developed in US English and there are many reasons why people keep the software in the original language, including that many languages have terrible translations or you want to be able to get support or understand software instructions.
There are 1.5 billion English speakers in the world, but only 380 million speak it as their first language [1] and just 245 million in the US [2] - more than 5 times as many people that use English that are not American than English speakers who are American.
My point being that browser locale (at least if it’s English) is not a relevant proxy for the user wanting US dates or times. Especially for financial data, please allow the possibilty of using an unambigous date format.
As a side note, my browser is set to override the date format to use the operating system format (which is YYYY-MM-DD) [3]. So the download file is not complying with my browser settings. But it’s a side note to the main point that it should be possible (or default) to have the ISO standard date format [4], “the correct way to write numeric dates”.
Thank you for your consideration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States
[3] intl.regional_prefs.use_os_locales from https://superuser.com/questions/1751692/how-can-i-change-the-date-format-in-firefox-without-changing-the-language-in-fir
[4] https://xkcd.com/1179/
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback! We’ve resolved the issue, and our downloads now use the ISO standard date format (YYYY-MM-DD) for clarity and consistency.
We appreciate you bringing this to our attention.
Best,
Liz
Many thanks! I just tried it and it works for me.