19121988

19121988 is a numeric string that commonly denotes a calendar date when interpreted in the DDMMYYYY convention, representing 19 December 1988. As a continuous sequence of digits with no separators, its meaning can be ambiguous without contextual formatting, because different regions and systems assign day, month, and year in varying orders.

In practice, 19121988 may be expanded with separators as 19-12-1988 or 19/12/1988 to reflect the day-month-year order used in much of Europe and other regions. If reformatted for the United States or other systems that use month-day-year order, the same digits would require rearrangement (for example to 12/19/1988) to convey December 19, 1988. Because the string lacks explicit structure, it is sensitive to locale and software parsing rules, which can lead to misinterpretation in data exchange or archival context.

In computing and data management, such compact date representations appear in filenames, legacy databases, or identifiers where separators are omitted for brevity. Modern standards commonly prefer unambiguous formats like ISO 8601 (1988-12-19) to avoid regional confusion and to facilitate sorting and parsing.

See also: date format, DDMMYYYY, MMDDYYYY, ISO 8601, date normalization.