Date format best for searching

[GreyGray 15]

Hello, I am often in the habit of date and time stamping everything I do.  Especially since an import of an exported EN file will lose the date created and modified.  It would be cool if a dev could explain why that is, but I will open a new thread as I have some specific questions on that.

 

Right now, I have a macro I made that I type "./date" anywhere and 08.23.2015 — 06:03:20 PM -0700 is added right there on the spot.  I can change that format to whatever I want, it is just a small shell script triggered by Keyboard Maestro. However, there is also a date injection tool built into EN, though you can't change the format, and I like to make sure people looking at a glance can tell if it is in a "US" format or some other format.

 

For searching on a date string, assuming you have lost the date created and modified data native to the note, what is the ideal date format to hand key into a note with regard to searching it out at a later time?

 

Also, is there a simple way to search for all notes that match my current date format, so I can make a small script that will on selection, modify them to the more ideal format that I hope someone will suggest?

 

Thanks

[dmcritchie 8]

> 08.23.2015 — 06:03:20 PM -0700    how to make  date so no problem in "U.S." or other date formats.

 

If you make the date portion  2015-08-23 in the ISO format there can be no confusion, specifically starting with

a four digit year and hyphens to separate the month and day of month (not periods or slashes).

 

I am on windows and my dates for example would appear as   2015-08-23 06:03 PM  as set in my "Region" system formats.

In Excel, for instance, you have the actual time stamp, and can later display it however you want in the application, or specific cell.

In Evernote if you use  Ctrl+; (semi-colon) you get a date stamp that if someone else viewed your Evernote file, I expect they

would see the date in their own choice of system format.   I noticed that when I finally corrected the system format on my current machine that those that I had entered with the Evernote shortcut  changed format automatically.  

• Evernote for Mac: Date Stamp (Shift+Command+D,   ⌘ ⇧ D) or Time Stamp (Alt+Shift+Command+D, ⌘ ⇧ ⌥ D) 
• Evernote for Windows: Date and Time Stamp (Ctrl+; )

If you had a column of time stamps you would probably really want to use 24 hour format instead of AM/PM, but for normal readability I'd stick with AM/PM in text contexts.

 

Your macro is creating a text string, and I think for Evernote notes other than in a table your use of AM/PM and and the UT hour offset as a text string, works very well, in text formats, if you were to for instance move to another time zone.   You would know the time when you wrote that in the local time when you were there.  And with the offset you'd know where you were in local time, and so would others.

 

As for searching time stamps within your notes, you wouldn't be able to that no matter what you used in Evernote, and of course that applies to your imported notes with the wrong timestamp (the time imported).  Evernote only handles  created and updated  in  date and  timestamp ranges.

To get a date range the syntax is a bit weird since it is two search arguments a positive and a negative (not created since 20150314)

created:20150101 -created:20150314

 

Good luck with your other posting about importation changing dates, I'd include "Request for Enhancement" in title and hope that someone in Evernote sees it before someone tells you the obvious, you can't do that in Evernote, or that is not the way Evernote works (which is why you asked for an enhancement,   arrrrg).    Maybe there is a better way to handle those requests.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Evernote Search honors only these characters as being part of a word in it searches:

• Letters
• Numbers
• Underscore ("_")

Any other character is treated as a word separator.

 

So for search on the entire date as a "word", your choices are:

1. 20150824
2. 2015_08_24

Using any other character as a separator in the date will cause Evernote to treat each part of the date as a separate "word".