ISO 8601 is an international standard for representing dates and times. It was published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and provides a well-defined, unambiguous method for representing dates and times, making it ideal for international communication and computer systems.
The standard follows the format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssZ, where: - YYYY represents the year - MM represents the month - DD represents the day - T is a separator indicating the start of the time element - hh represents hours (in 24-hour format) - mm represents minutes - ss represents seconds - .sss represents fractions of seconds (optional) - Z indicates that the time is in UTC (or +/-hh:mm can be used to indicate an offset from UTC)
Examples: - 2023-04-15T14:30:00Z (2:30 PM UTC on April 15, 2023) - 2023-04-15T14:30:00+02:00 (2:30 PM in a timezone 2 hours ahead of UTC)
ISO 8601 is widely used in computing, data exchange, and APIs because it eliminates ambiguity in date representations and is easily sortable.