Date Formats

by Hla Min

Updated : Aug 2025

Day, Month, Year

This is the format used in Myanmar.

For example, August 22, 2018 can be displayed in various flavors.

• DD-MM-YYYY (The day, month and year are displayed as numbers. e.g. 22-08-2018)
• A different delimiter/separator may be used. Using the forward slash as a delimiter, the format becomes DD/MM/YYYY (e.g. 22/08/2018)
• DD-MMM-YYYY (The month is represented by three letters. (e.g. 22-AUG-2019)

Y2K Problem

In the early days of computing, some people tried to save space, time and money by using only two digits for the Year.
As the Millennium approach, the news media ran stories of possible errors, ambiguities and accidents due to computers using two-digit year format.

To represent the dates of very old people and events may be tricky using the two-digit format.

It can be ambiguous for some dates.
22-08-18 could mean 22-08-2018, 22-08-1918 or even earlier dates.

Month, Day, Year

This is the format used in the USA

• MM-DD-YYYY (e.g. 08-22-2018)
• MM/DD/YYYY (e.g. 08/22/12018)
• MMM-DD-YYYY (e.g. AUG-22-2018)
• In the early days, only two digits were used for the Year. It was the cause of the infamous Y2K Problem.

Year, Month, Day

• YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. 2018-08-22)
• YYYY/MM/DD (e.g. 2018/08/22)
• YYYYMMDD (e.g. 20180822). One advantage of this representation is that the dates can be sorted easily.

Number of days from a specified base date

The representation uses the interval between the two dates.

Number of days in a year (instead of Month and Day)

In this system, 1st January is represented as 001.

1st February is represented as 032.

The interval between two dates in the same year is easily calculated.