The added date is mm/dd/yyyy, should be localised and/or configurable

[PaulBags]

---

name: '🐛 Bug Report'
about: 'Report a general bug'

Type: Bug Report

• [ ✅ ] Try to follow the update procedure described in the README and try again before opening this issue.
• Also checked Config.ts in case there was some hidden setting I was missing (though localisation should be per user).

Your Environment

• Version used:
  • Version (stable release)
    4.3.1
  • Commit ID (development release) git --no-pager log -1
• Environment name and version:
  • Node.js version node --version
    v12.19.0
  • npm version npm --version
    7.1.0
  • Web browser name and version
    Firefox version 83.0
• Operating system and version:
  Windows 10 v20H2
• Torrent client and version:

Summary: dates are wrong

For me mm/dd/yyyy is specifically wrong, confusing, & neigh unreadable. yyyy-mm-dd would be my preference (and an international standard, readable by everyone 😊) but even dd/mm/yyyy would be better.

Edit: I'm updating this to a bug report, because frankly the date format is completely incorrect if being tied to the language English. The date format used is American.

Expected Behavior: being able to read the date.

Current Behavior: date format unreadable.

Possible Solution

My solution would be a place for a setting in settings > user interface, directly under the language setting.
Could be a drop down menu with predetermined formats, a field for entering a custom format - or both, with custom being an option in the drop down menu.

Steps to Reproduce N/A

Context

[jesec]

It depends on your language.

I tried different languages, and it seems that the date is properly formatted.

English:

日本語：

[PaulBags]

That's not how this works, date formats are tied to countries - not languages.

There are english speaking countries that officially use dd/mm/yyyy and only dd/mm/yyyy. Language selection is not an answer.

And besides, people may have preferences that differ from their localisation.

[PaulBags]

Hmm. I've been poking around crowdin, but I can't figure out how to touch english or add any of the localised englishes as a target language so that I can fix the date.

I assume crowdin is the correct tool, unless I have to go off and fix the date formatter in react...

[PaulBags]

I'm updating this to a bug. English language uses dmy, a similar language called American uses mdy. The localisation for English is incorrect and since it's the projects root language it's uneditable.

[PaulBags]

Oh and well I'm here: language won't stay on specifically English. Reverts to Automatic.

Ok now it is. Maybe I got too upset to hit save settings? 🤷‍♂️

[PaulBags]

Ah, I see that client/src/javascript/util/detectLocale.ts is specifically ignoring localisations. That won't help.

[PaulBags]

Console output showing overriding to be the source of the problem:

(new Date()).toLocaleDateString();
"14/12/2020"
Intl.DateTimeFormat().format(new Date())
"14/12/2020"
Intl.DateTimeFormat('en').format(new Date())
"12/14/2020"
Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-GB').format(new Date())
"14/12/2020"
Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-GB'.substr(0,2)).format(new Date())
"12/14/2020"

[jesec]

Currently Flood uses FormattedDate of react-intl. It uses the current language settings, and I don't think it has the capability to specify different date format.

[PaulBags]

"It uses the current language settings"

It's not, check your own code: flood is truncating locales.

Sorry let me rephrase. Yes react-intl is using current locale, however flood is setting locale by truncating where there isn't an existing match. This is good enough for string translation, but affects date format - and possibly affects decimal seperator elsewhere as well.

[jesec]

detectLocale now respects the locale of user and passes it to the IntlProvider. Though, Flood still uses the old behavior if you specify language manually. I think it would be too much maintenance burden for the project if a separate manual selection menu needs to be added for locale.

[PaulBags]

Or a single very long list of "languages"/locales.

This is an elegant solution which is working well, thank you. I'm impressed.

P.S. if anyone does want to take this further I boiled the English locales down to four "types": en, en-CA, en-001, and en-150.

en uses `mdy` date formats and the decimal seperator `.`
 locales: en, en-AS, en_BI, en_GU, en_MH, en_MP, en_PR, en_UM, en-US, en-US-POSIX, en_VI
en-CA uses `ymd` date formats and the decimal seperator `.`
 locales: en-CA, en_SE, en-ZA
en-150 uses `dmy` date formats and the decimal seperator `,`
 locales: en-<any in Europe>
en-001 uses `dmy` date formats and the decimal seperator `.`
 locales: en-<rest of world>

But, frankly, that way lays madness.

[GitHubGeek]

Thanks guys, the dates look much better now in Flood. en-GB locale now shows dd/mm/yyyy

[lwbt]

Using a format that users of a certain locale typically expect is probably fine. But at least an option to switch to ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD should be provided. I'm German, I often use English and whenever I have to use a date format it is ISO 8601 (date -I in bash scripts). Then I have one thing less to worry about.