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Comment by _dain_ | Hacker News Reader

The T makes it hard to visually parse. Whenever I try to read a timestamp using the T I have to scan it very carefully to see the date-time boundary. It'sWasWifWweWusedWaW"W"WtoWdenoteWwordWboundaries. I beg you people, use a space:

2021-11-21 15:10:35

See how much easier that is?

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I agree on the 'T' being harder to read, but dislike the use of a space as it makes it ill-suited for use in a filename, and would allow word-wrapping to occur between the two sections. I'd much rather they had used an underscore instead of a 'T'.

Does windows not allow spaces or something? Unix variants seem fine with it.

Programmers hate dealing with whitespace in strings with a burning passion.

Which I've always considered a weird anachronism, because 'space' isn't represented any differently than any other character, U+0020, unless you really want to get into the variety of "whitespace" elements. Same with newlines. It's all bytes.

Best to avoid spaces in file names even if the OS allows it (hell, you can put a new line in file names in Linux and I believe Mac OS but that's a terrible idea) because many programs will exhibit major error states if they end up processing these names due to assumptions about file names.

Macos allowing leading spaces in file/folder names made for some fun shenanigans on a school laptop with not great grep usage for blocking apps.

Best to combine a carriage return and tab.

    irb> puts “2021-11-21\r\t15:10:35”
    2021-11-21
        15:10:35

And thats the reason why we should use more spaces and other special characters in filenames at every public used places. Thats the only way this bugs of lazy and stupid software developers getting fixed finally.

The principled stance is nice (and I agree with it generally) but sometimes you just need to get work done and not have to rely on trying to get some developer to fix something. Fully agreed though that it's lazy programming if an application can't deal with spaces.

Windows does not allow the colon (":") in filenames, so you can't use the ISO date-time format in filenames anyway.

RFC 3339 notes:

      NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T".
      Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of
      readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by
      (say) a space character.

I tend to use the space whenever possible.

Note also that ISO 8601 doesn't require the "T" to be uppercase. A lowercase "t" might be slightly more readable: 2021-11-21t15:10:35

The reason for avoiding spaces in file names is because of broken bash scripts, that don’t quote their arguments. Meaning about 99 out of 100 of them.

Not that avoiding such names solves the problem, it just makes the RCE vulnerability more latent.

Soundly like space-filled names would be a good best practice to force you to harden your scripts.

Microsoft deliberately named it "C:\Program Files" for exactly this reason.

That makes a surprising amount of sense actually

There exist non-breaking spaces for that exact reason.

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