The purpose of this document is to provide a standard set of date and time format representations for information interchange, in order to minimize the risk of misinterpretation, confusion, and their consequences.

This document specifies a set of date and time format representations utilizing numbers, alphabets and symbols defined in [ISOIEC646]. These representations are meant to be both human recognizable and machine readable.

This document retains the most commonly used expressions for date and time of day and their representations from earlier International Standards in the field, including earlier editions of ISO 8601 and its predecessors.

This document specifies representations of dates of the Gregorian calendar and times based on the 24-hour clock, as well as composite elements of them, as character strings for use in information interchange. It is also applicable for representing times and time shifts based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

This document excludes the representation of date elements from non-Gregorian calendars or times not from the 24-hour clock. This document does not address character encoding of representations specified in this document is also not covered.