Timestamps more formatting options

[philipaarseth]

Hi,

The current timestamp formatting options are extremely limiting and difficult to work with.
For instance there is currently no way to show weekdays without using the absolute longest option, which is really hard to make look good.

What I'd like to see is formatting like date-fns format() that is based on Unicode technical standard #35
https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-dates.html#Date_Field_Symbol_Table
https://date-fns.org/v2.28.0/docs/format

Edit:
Or if that's not viable, I'd love to see short and long weekday (i.e Wed & Wednesday) and a shorter long date like 24. May.

[Rapptz]

The fixed formats were chosen because they are i18n friendly. Arbitrary format strings can lead to cases where it looks better in one language but looks unnatural in another language.

[philipaarseth]

That's surely something that can be accounted for.

If it's not then adding a short and long weekday (i.e Wed & Wednesday) and a shorter long date like 24. May would also be just fine.

[Rapptz]

To be a bit more explicit, the current system just uses the locale to render the date how someone would expect it (e.g. MM/DD/YYYY vs DD/MM/YYYY) using a short set of strings that allow Intl.DateTimeFormat to work with that constraint in mind. Free form format strings like the ones in the Unicode TR35 would make it possible for a user to create a format string that would look fine in e.g. en-US locale but look foreign in ja-JP locale.

Adding additional locale-independent formats for weekday is viable though, exposed through the weekday key in Intl.DateTimeFormat which supports both long and short.

[philipaarseth]

Yeah, I get that and it does make sense. It's nice how it's implemented, but it's just frustratingly limiting.

I'd be pretty happy if I could just have long and short weekdays though.

[QuantumToasted]

+1 to adding support for long and/or short day formatting options. A bot I am developing features a reminder system, of which users can set daily and weekly reminders for whatever they may need. When users create said daily or weekly reminder, the bot will reinforce the time (and day of the week) that they'll be reminded, mostly for confirmation reasons.

While I am able to use the t (short time) formatting option to display the correct time-of-day for the user for daily reminders, the same can't be said for weekly reminders. If the bot formats the day with UTC+0 in mind, this can cause weird things like a US user setting a reminder at 10 PM on a Saturday, but the bot, with no knowledge of the user's timezone, telling them the reminder is set for 10 PM (localized) on Sundays (not localized, as in UTC, it's already past midnight).

[philipaarseth]

Any chance we could see some work be put into this? Would likely be a very quick task implement some more formatting options, that are basically chopped up of the ones that already exist.

Formatting options I'd love to see are:
Wed
Wednesday
24. May