Menu
For passing times in JSON to/from a web API, why would I choose to use an ISO8601 string instead of simply the UTC epoch value? For example, both of these are the same:
Epoch = 1511324473
iso8601 = 2017-11-22T04:21:13Z
The epoch value is obviously shorter in length, which is always good for mobile data usage, and it's pretty simple to convert between epoch values and the language's local Date type variable.
I'm just not seeing the benefit to using an ISO string value.
771
In a computing context, an epoch is the date and time relative to which a computer's clock and timestamp values are determined. The epoch traditionally corresponds to 0 hours, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds (00:00:00) Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on a specific date, which varies from system to system.
ISO 8601 represents date and time by starting with the year, followed by the month, the day, the hour, the minutes, seconds and milliseconds. For example, 2020-07-10 15:00:00.000, represents the 10th of July 2020 at 3 p.m. (in local time as there is no time zone offset specified—more on that below).
Date.prototype.toISOString() The toISOString() method returns a string in simplified extended ISO format (ISO 8601), which is always 24 or 27 characters long ( YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ or ±YYYYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ , respectively). The timezone is always zero UTC offset, as denoted by the suffix Z .
How is it more accurate? ISO-8601 allows for leap seconds, it uses the same second counting frequency as the Unix timestamp, it can represent dates before 1970 and after 2038 (64-bit Unix timestamps will also.) and it's an international standard.
Both are unambiguous and easy to parse in programs. The benefit of epoch like you have mentioned is that it is smaller and will be faster to process in your program. The downside is it means nothing to humans.
iso8901 dates are easy to read on their own and don't require the user to translate a number in to a recognizable date. The size increase in iso8601 is unnoticeable when compared to much much larger things like images.
Personally I would pick ease of reading over speed for an API as it will cut down on debugging time while inspecting values sent and received. In another situation such as passing times around internally you may wish to choose the speed of an integer over text so it depends which you think will be more useful.
138
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
