20200102

20200102 is an eight-digit date representation that encodes January 2, 2020 in the year-month-day order (YYYYMMDD). In this compact form, the year is represented by four digits, followed by two-digit month and two-digit day, making the string 20200102.

This format is commonly used in computing, data logging, and file naming because it is compact, language-agnostic, and sortable when treated as text. Since the digits are fixed in length, software can reliably parse the values by extracting substrings: year digits 1 through 4, month digits 5 through 6, and day digits 7 through 8. It also ensures that chronological order is preserved in lexical comparisons, which can simplify sorting and indexing in databases and logs.

However, the fixed-width numeric form has limitations. It is less human-friendly in everyday communication where separators (such as 2020-01-02 or 2020/01/02) improve readability. Without separators, there is potential for confusion when the format is shared with other date conventions or in multilingual contexts. The representation does not encode time or time zone information, so it must be supplemented with additional data if precise timestamps are required.

Relation to standards: the same date in ISO 8601 is written as 2020-01-02, with hyphens to indicate the components clearly. The compact 20200102 form is widely used in file names, versioning schemes, and data records where space or delimiter constraints exist. See also ISO 8601, yyyymmdd, and date formats.