Date format (d m y or m d y) issue

marcoderks · October 27, 2015

In the entry for e.g. a news paper article, there are two fields in which a date needs to be filled in: date of publication and date of consultation. However, they work differently and cause problems.
I want to mention 7 January 2009 as the date of publication: no matter what I fill in, when I press Enter, it shows exactly what I have filled in (e.g. “7 January 2009”, “7 Jan 2009”, “7-1-2009”), but it interprets this by either indicating “m d y” or “d m y” behind it. Sometimes this interpretation is wrong. It seems like it presupposes I mean “m d y” unless it is clear that I don’t mean this (e.g. when I type “January”).
I want to mention 7 January 2009 as the date of consultation: oddly, this works different. For example, when I type “7-1-9”, it changes this into “1-7-2009”, but it does not show whether it has interpreted this as July or January (i.e. it doesn’t say “d m y” or “m d y”).

adamsmith · October 27, 2015

the way Zotero is construed, you'd basically never handle the accessed date manually (why are you?), which is why it doesn't have the date-parsing labels or mechanisms the issued date has -- if you do really need to input it, I'd recommend using ISO dates, i.e. YYYY-MM-DD, which is also what the field shows you when you click on it (and thus how you can tell how it interpreted any other form of date entry).

For the month/date parsing of the issued date, the preferred order should depend on the language of your Firefox/Zotero version, though unfortunately that doesn't always work out of the box. Which Zotero version are you using and in what language?

marcoderks · November 1, 2015

Hi Adam,
Thanks for your response!
The reason I filled in the accessed dates for some entries is because I had found these sources online before starting to work with Zotero. But thanks for the ISO suggestion.
I am using version 4.0.28.7 in Dutch. If it's easier, I could switch to English.

adamsmith · November 1, 2015

my guess would be that currently you're getting numerical dates consistenly interpreted by US conventions (i.e. MDY) unless that's impossible, i.e. the first number is >12. If you're very unhappy with that, we can probably find a way for you to fix that for your version -- there's an existing thread with instructions, but I'd have to dig that up.