There is no single-digit formatter for month

[glajchs]

Expected behaviour

I can format a date like (4/3) for April 3rd without requiring a custom formatter.

Actual behaviour

The default formats April 3rd like (04/3), which looks very weird. I can double-digit pad the day to make it look like (04/03), but that still looks bad.

Live demo with steps to reproduce

http://jsfiddle.net/LLExL/11754/

Product version

6.0.7

Affected browser(s)

All

[sebastianbochan]

Hi @glajchs
The dateformat is a subset of the formats for PHP's strftime function.

If you need to have custom one, you should use formatter.

[pawelfus]

We don't have to use formatter, we can keep format option and simply define our own format for month numbers without leading zeros, API: https://api.highcharts.com/class-reference/Highcharts.html#.dateFormats

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/BlackLabel/LLExL/11801/

PS: In my opinion 02/30, 03/01 and 03/04 looks better than 2/30, 3/1 and 3/4 which looks like fractions.

[TorsteinHonsi]

I agree with @glajchs, we should support this. In some cultures (like my own), it is common to write 10/3 for April 10th and so on. I'm surprised PHP doesn't have a symbol for this.

Do you have any suggestion for which letter to use? Any conventions out there in other programming languages?

[pawelfus]

How about %j ? Like PHP, but from date: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

[sebastianbochan]

But the %j in returns global day from a year, not month.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strftime.php

[glajchs]

I have a suggestion for what the new "month # without leading zero" variable should be, which is "%o". Highcharts uses a subset of the PHP API, as linked above. In the PHP API, the standard seems to be to use the next available letter in the alphabet, in lower case, when providing the non-leading-zeros-prefixed version of a value. For instance the leading-zero-prefixed 24 hour value is "%H", and the non-leading-zero-prefixed version of the 24 hour value is "%k". It's not "%h" because that's already taken, and it's not "%i", or "%j" because those are already taken.

Since our 2 digit month is "%m", and "%M" is already taken, the next value could be "%n", but I'd advise against that since you're borrowing a subset from the PHP API, and in the PHP API "%n" is newline char (even though highcharts doesn't support this).