BRAZE LIQUID — Date Variable & ISO 8601 — Liquid For Technical Marketers
BRAZE LIQUID — Date Variable & ISO 8601 — Liquid For Technical Marketers
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What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to LIQUID FOR TECHNICAL MARKETERS!
Today, we’re going to talk about the Date Variable and the ISO 8601. Whoa, that’s a lot of letters and numbers! But don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds.
Let’s get started!
Date Variable
Technically, in Liquid, there is no variable type for Date. Because Date values are surrounded in quotes, it is technically a String.
However, Braze does recognize Date as a separate variable. Even though the Date variable is still technically a String, it is a special type of String that has plenty of use cases of its own that the Date variable gets its own set of rules and Liquid filters.
Braze actually calls this datatype Time, but for this video, whenever we mention the datatype Date, this Date can include both date and time.
There are many use cases for why we would use a Date variable. Birthday, registration_date, last_opened_app, anniversary, the options are endless.
Because there are so many use cases, learning about the Liquid use cases for the Date variable is that much more valuable. First, let’s talk about the date format we should use, when working with Date variables.
ISO 8601
ISO 8601 is the weird set of letters and numbers that we talked about in the beginning of the video. However, it’s actually quite simple.
First, ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization, and here’s the Wikipedia page for ISO 8601.
I’m sure we’ve all seen the ISO 8601 Date format at some point in our lives: it’s simply the YYYY-MM-DD date format, or if we want to go one step further and include time, then it’s YYYY-MM-DD, capital T, which I believe stands for Time, and hh:mm:ss, and then a timezone designator TZD.
So the full format is: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD.
So what’s the point of ISO 8601, and why should we use it?
The answer is really in the name: it’s an international organization for STANDARDIZATION, meaning this Date format, ISO 8601, allows users all over the world to stay consistent with their Date variable format. We know that in the US, we tend to write our dates in month-date-year order, and in Europe, they tend to write their dates in date-month-year order.
However, by following ISO 8601 format, we can stay universally consistent by keeping our Date format YYYY-MM-DD.
So, whenever you’re assigning variables with a Date value, make sure to use the ISO 8601 format!
ISO 8601 Example
So let’s create a Date variable together. We’re going to assign a variable called lftm_start_date which will be set to 2024–04–30, capital T, and it started at 4pm.
Make sure you brush up on your 24-hour clock, because ISO 8601 uses the 24-hour format. So 16 colon:00:00, 4pm on the dot.
Lastly, we need the timezone designator, which I always forget, so I search up “Pacific Time”, and you can usually find your designator pretty quickly.
So we’re currently in Pacific Daylight Time, so our timezone designator is -07:00.
By the way, this -07:00 means that we are 7 hours behind the Coordinated Universal Time, also known as UTC. UTC is not a timezone, but it’s a time standard; however, UTC follows the same time as GMT, Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich is located in London.
Thank You!
That’s it for today! Thank you for watching, and see you next time!
allan@fornowmarketing.com
fornowmarketing.com
