Pliant follows the ISO 8601 standard when it comes to exposing date and time information. All dates and times are in UTC if not stated otherwise.

Date

Date information is usually represented in the format YYYY-MM-DD. For example 2025-05-21.

Time

Time information is usually represented in the format YYYY-MM-DD"T"HH:MI:SS.NNNNNN"Z". For example 2025-05-21T12:34:56.123456Z.

We use nanosecond-precision. Fractional seconds are represented after a decimal point following the seconds component. The number of digits after the decimal point is variable — the standard does not mandate a fixed length (e.g., always six digits).

The fractional component is interpreted as a decimal fraction of a second. So: 2025-05-21T12:34:56.123Z means 123 milliseconds or 123000 nanoseconds. The trailing zeros are omitted.

Hence 2025-05-21T12:34:56.123Z and 2025-05-21T12:34:56.123000Z represent the same point in time.