Formatting the Date and Time

Why we need different formats

One of the glorious things about the world is that we all do things a bit differently. One of those things is how we refer to dates and time.

In my neck of the woods, it’s customary to write the date as day - month – year, e.g., 23-12-2012. But in the United States, the more common format would be 12-23-2012. Likewise, the data may be in formats that name the months or weekdays (e.g., January and Tuesday) or combine dates and time together (e.g., 2012-12-23 15:45:32). So if we were to attempt to load in some data and try to get D3 to recognize it as date/time information, we really need to tell it what format the date/time is in.

You might be asking yourself: “What’s the point?” All we want to do is give it a number, and it can sort it out somehow. Well, that is true, but if we want to really bring out the best in our data and keep maximum flexibility in ...