Friday 23 August 2013

Kenya

G'day:
My mate Duncan did some research for me on the subject of date formats, as feedback to yesterday's article "Not every single string that can possibly be parsed as a date should be treated like a date!".

I had made this claim:
[...]there is not situation in which a string formatted as "xx/xx/xx" should be interpreted as a date "yy/mm/dd". No-one writes dates as "yy/mm/dd".

Well Duncan pointed me at this Wikipedia page: "Date format by country". Wikipedia seems to have pages for everything.

As it turns out there is a country in which the date format is "yy/mm/dd": Kenya. Who'd've known?

That said, I stand by my point. Not for the sake of pigheadedness (well not solely that ;-), but because "Kenyan" (or any approximation thereof) is not a locale that ColdFusion supports (according to the locales listed in server.coldfusion.supportedLocales, anyhow).

So in the context of CFML... there still really is no justification for ColdFusion to ever to consider the string "xx/xx/xx" as a date-parseable value representing the format "yy/mm/dd". For it to do so, IMO, is a bug: 3617365.

--
Adam