Is there any kind of standard for representing date ranges?

Question

ISO 8601 represents a date as YYYY-MM-DD.

It doesn't seem to offer any recommendation on how to represent a date range, for example:

2013-01-01 => 2013-06-31

Does ISO 8601, or another standard, give a sensible recommendation for representing date ranges?

Background: this is to be used as the output of the toString() method of a DateRange object, output which could then be parsed with a parse() method.

Answer 1

ISO 8601 does have a standard for representing date ranges. To represent the start and end date using this format you would write:

2013-01-01/2013-06-31

Note how the forward slash is used as the interval designator to separate the start and end dates.

See here for more information.

Answer 2

Just to add to Ben Smith's answer above, the standard also mentions using a double hypen (--) as the interval designator in certain contexts, instead of the forward slash (/). For example, in file or directory names where using a forward slash is forbidden in some operating systems (e.g. Windows).

So the above examples would be

2013-01-01--2013-06-31

or

2013-01-01--06-31

in abbreviated form