As an IQFeed developer, I received an email today containing the following information:

As a developer in numerous countries - including your own - over the last 25 years, I find it amazing that you have chosen to ignore the excellent ISO date format in favor of this absurdly confusing option. It may have escaped your attention that no-one in the rest of the world uses this purely American format, for the very good reasons detailed in this link: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date

A standard exists, surely you should consider using it.

Ever since the Y2K saga, I too have been a proponent of the ISO format. As a bi-product, it is also results in decent sortable fields y->m->d.

I presume the goal was to retain as much compatibility with existing software as possible, which precludes moving to a radically different format. But if that isn't an issue, I agree completely that the ISO standard is the way to go.

All that aside, there are other parts of the notice that need clarification.

First, it says "all date fields within IQFeed will soon be sent in the format MM\DD\YYYY" but the examples show "MM/DD/YY - will become MM/DD/YYYY" and "MM/DD - will become MM/DD/YYYY". So, is the separator supposed to be a backslash (\) or a slash (/) or do we need to handle both?

Second, the split factor fields are described as "#36 Split factor 1 - Currently - will become" and "#37 Split factor 2 - Currently - will become". The field descriptions are entirely missing. I can guess, but I'd much rather have confirmation. What will they be?

Allen

I apologize for the incompleteness and inconsistency of the email. It was sent late in the day and was composed interspersed with several discussions, so some content was inadvertantly left out.
The data format is changing to MM/DD/YYYY for all dates, including the Split dates, and will universally use forward slashes '/'.
This is just the first step towards consistency in the data. We recognize the advantages of the ISO standard format and that is our ultimate goal.
However, as suggested in the previous response, it is our intention with this change to minimize the impact on the data feed and downstream developers. Release of a complete date format change would require a complete replacement of IQFeed components in the field. (I realize that was done recently and we did include significant changes in server-IQFeed communications, that hopefully are not evident to the IQFeed user, but the date format was not prioritized to be included with those changes.)

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Lonnie Shumate
Development Manager, IQ Systems
DTN Market ACCESS