Dates and times

Following the release of R1B2 I have now abandoned Windows on my “leisure” computer, and am trying to get a few things organised.

One of these is a calendar program. Sadly, the only Haiku calendars use the US date style (MMDDYY), which is almost unknown outside the US. It would be OK if dates were configurable, but they are not. It might also be OK if the US system was logical, but it’s not. Even in the US, the date style is not universal. The military doesn’t use it, and nor do many scientific and other institutions.

So I should like to make a plea that calendar makers - and others who need to show dates - either make dates configurable, or use the ISO standard, which is YYYYMMDD.

And the same goes for time. AM and PM really should be placed on the scrap heap. The 24 hour clock (HH:MM, not HHMM) is the only way to go.

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Preferences -> Locale allows you to change the date and time format.
A few additional settings are available in Preferences -> Time specifically for the DeskBar clock

https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/fr/preferences/locale.html
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/fr/preferences/time.html

I don’t know which calendar app you’re referring to, but as far as I know native apps should use the Locale Kit APIs and format dates and times in the format configured there.

It is YYYY-MM-DD

Yes, OK. It was the order I was concentrating on; but you are quite right about the punctuation.

Thanks. I can change to the 24 hour clock, but I can’t seem to find a way to change the date format. My guess is that there is an assumption that American English is the only form of English, and that all English speakers write dates in the format used by some (but not all) Americans.

I linked the docs which show very clearly how to select a country specific variant of english for date formatting. You can pick English (Europe) or English (World) if you want a non-american date format.

I can tell you that it works, for the very simple reason that I’m not american and I wouldn’t use their date format. In my case I have set it to French (France) and I get dates in the format I expect.

There is certainly no assumption that only American English exists here…

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Thanks.

This laptop has an excellent 1920*1200 screen, but my eyes are no longer of the same quality. I didn’t notice the small arrow to the left of the word “English” which shows nearly a hundred versions of English when you press on it.

I’ve no doubt used it in the past, but had forgotten. My memory is as dim as my eyes these days.

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