There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy, so if you encounter a date in that format, it is safe to assume dd.mm.yyyy.

Contrast this with the slash or dash notation, where both mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy are prevalent in the world. But 2020-08-06 is unambiguous in the same way that 06.08.2020 is: the only convention in common use is yyyy-mm-dd.

> There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy

While slash is the most common, use of hyphens and dots as separators for US-style dates is not at all unheard of in the wild for manually formatted dates. The fact that it doesn't show up in lists of national “preferred formats” and doesn't tend to be commonly implemented as a prebaked format in software doesn't mean it's not a real thing people see and will interpret dates they see in light of.

How is that safe to assume??? You can't assume anything, why not ask the source of the data? The other way is to attempt to confirm which order by looking for first 2 digits > 12, but that info might not be available depending on the data.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true in Canada. MDY is very common, especially in the English parts. See:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

MDY separated by dots? The link you gave does not seem to support that.

Separating dates with dots (DD.MM.YYYY) is what’s taught in school in Germany.

So, yeah, there is a convention to write dates exactly that way.

Read the comment again...

It's unambiguous for everybody except Americans with their weird switching.

Does anyone use mm.dd.yyyy?

Germany does. Probably the majority of Europe too

I think you misread: most of mainland Europe including Germany use dd.mm.yyyy or something else that is reasonable sane even if it isn't sortable like yyyy-mm-dd. Or am I wrong on this? Norway at least use mm.dd.yyyy and never mm/dd or mm.dd.yyyy

Afaik Norway also uses the sane format: DD.MM.YYYY

See parent source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Edit: of course. To late to edit but if you read my post, but that was what I meant.

> The format dd.mm.yyyy using dots is the traditional German date format.

> Since 1996-05-01, the international format yyyy-mm-dd has become the official standard date format

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Schools still teach DD.MM.YYYY. That’s what’s relevant because that’s what people actually widely use.

Shouldn’t Americans be very familiar with the idea that official norms (the metric system) play no role if the people don’t want to use them?

I understand - it seems I was too optimistic to read that the use of yyyy-mm-dd has become "the official standard" in Germany, without considering the popular usage and convention under discussion.