[YouTube] New short date format

[Theta-Dev]

YouTube is A/B testing a new, shorter format for video upload dates.

The long format is still used for comments and playlist update dates.

en-US

• Year: y
• Month: mo
• Week: w
• Day: d
• Hour: h
• Minute: min

en-GB

• Year: yr
• Month: mo
• Week: wk
• Day: day(s)
• Hour: hr
• Minute: min

The A/B test currently occurs very rarely (14 out of 1000 requests).

Here is a visitor data cookie for testing: CgtJeFI1cWVSWVBTNCj6yc6jBg%3D%3D

[AudricV]

I think it should occur in all languages.

fr

• Year: a;
• Month: m.;
• Week: sem.;
• Day: d;
• Hour: h;
• Minutes: min.

[Theta-Dev]

Yes, it does. I have just written down the English versions.

BTW: YouTube most likely uses the Unicode CLDR repository for their date strings.

https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr-json/blob/main/cldr-json/cldr-dates-full/main/en-GB/dateFields.json

Here are the relevant keys:

Long version: <unit>.relativeTime-type-past

Short version: <unit>-short.relativeTime-type-past

So if we want to reimplement multi-language extraction, we can just use the CLDR data and dont need to fetch samples from YouTube to build a parsing dictionary.

[wb9688]

It seems like YouTube is actually using the narrow version for this, not the short version.

[Theta-Dev]

Are you sure about that? In German the two versions are different and they use short version. What languages did you check?

Update: Yes, the English version uses a mixture of the short and narrow version. It does not seem to work that simple.