Create Effective Date of Birth Form

Key challenges

Collecting dates of birth from international users can present several challenges, including differences in date format, language barriers, and cultural differences in how dates are expressed.

Despite these challenges, it is necessary to normalize dates into a standard format for use in a global system like, which accepts only dates of birth that are in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) for consistency and accuracy.

Best practices

Consider these best practices for capturing and translating user dates of birth into ISO 8601 format:

• Identify the user's location through their IP address, language preferences, or other means, and differentiate between locales such as en-US and en-GB. Knowing the user's location and language can help to validate their date of birth accurately by applying country-specific date validation rules and providing localized date format options.

• Present a DOB input field with a localized format hint for that locale. For example:

  • For US and Canada: YYYY-MM-DD
  • For Europe: DD/MM/YYYY
  • For China: YYYY-MM-DD

• When the user submits the DOB form, do the following:

  • Use a locale-specific date parser to parse the input date. For example:

    • In Java, use the DateTimeFormatter class to parse and format date and time values. Use a Locale object to specify the language and cultural norms to be used in formatting and parsing.
    • In JavaScript, use the Intl.DateTimeFormat object to create a formatter for displaying dates and times according to the locale and options specified.

  • Capture the date, month, and year components from the parsed data.

  • Reassemble these components in the ISO 8601 format when passing the DOB to the RiskOS™ endpoint.

  The following script can be used to assist in this process:

  Python

  import re
  from datetime import datetime
  
  
  def convert_date(date_string):
      # Map each strptime format to a regular expression that recognizes it.
      date_formats = {
          "%Y-%m-%d": r"^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$",            # ISO 8601: China, Japan, Korea, Sweden, etc.
          "%m/%d/%Y": r"^\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{4}$",            # United States and English Canada
          "%d-%m-%Y": r"^\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4}$",            # United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, India, etc.
          "%Y/%m/%d": r"^\d{4}/\d{2}/\d{2}$",            # Iran, Iraq
          "%Y.%m.%d": r"^\d{4}\.\d{2}\.\d{2}$",          # Indonesia, Mongolia, South Korea, etc.
          "%d.%m.%Y": r"^\d{2}\.\d{2}\.\d{4}$",          # Croatia, Lithuania, Serbia, Slovakia, etc.
          "%b %d, %Y": r"^[A-Za-z]{3} \d{1,2}, \d{4}$",  # E.g. Jan 30, 2020 - US and English Canada
          "%d %b %Y": r"^\d{1,2} [A-Za-z]{3} \d{4}$",    # E.g. 30 Jan 2020 - India, Malaysia, Singapore
          "%Y년 %m월 %d일": r"^\d{4}년 \d{1,2}월 \d{1,2}일$",  # North and South Korea
          "%Y年%m月%d日": r"^\d{4}年\d{1,2}月\d{1,2}日$",       # China, Japan
      }
  
      # Iterate over the formats and return the first one that matches.
      for date_format, date_regex in date_formats.items():
          if re.match(date_regex, date_string):
              # Parse the string into a datetime using the matching format.
              return datetime.strptime(date_string, date_format)
  
      # If the date string doesn't match any known format, raise a ValueError.
      raise ValueError(f"Unrecognized date format: {date_string}")
  
  
  print(convert_date("01/02/2020").date())  # 2020-01-02
  print(convert_date("02-01-2020").date())  # 2020-01-02
  print(convert_date("2020年1月2日").date())  # 2020-01-02

• Gracefully handle invalid dates or dates with missing components by displaying an appropriate error message requesting a valid date of birth in the proper format for that locale.

  You can use the following regex to determine when an exception needs to be displayed:

  ^([0-9]{4})-(0[1-9]|1[0-2])-(0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])([Zz]|
  [+-][0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2})?$