Introduction

The purpose of this document is to provide a standard set of date and time format representations for information interchange, in order to minimize the risk of misinterpretation, confusion and their consequences. This document specifies a set of date and time format representations utilizing numbers, alphabets and symbols defined in ISO/IEC 646. These representations are meant to be both human recognizable and machine readable. This document retains the most commonly used expressions for date and time of day and their representations from earlier International Standards in the field, including earlier editions of ISO 8601 and its predecessors