How to generate random date?
Introduction
When testing systems that handle resources marked with dates, it is often useful to generate a set of random dates to simulate real-world data conditions. This allows developers to verify that the system behaves correctly across a variety of temporal scenarios, including edge cases such as leap years or month-end boundaries.
One of the most commonly used date formats in IT systems is the ISO 8601-compliant format: YYYY-MM-DD. This format starts with a four-digit year, followed by a two-digit month and a two-digit day, with each segment separated by a dash - for example, 2025-05-03. Both the month and day must include leading zeros when necessary, ensuring consistent length and enabling proper sorting in text-based systems.
This structured format is preferred in databases, APIs, and logs because it avoids regional ambiguities that exist in other formats, such as MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY. It is both human-readable and easy for machines to parse and compare.
Using random dates in this format during system testing can help uncover issues related to data validation, chronological ordering, or date-range filtering, making it a practical and effective approach in software quality assurance.
Example codes
Below you will find 10 examples of random date.
Generator configuration
Our free random date generator needs the appropriate settings to generate a file with data in the right format. Below is the exact configuration that should be set to get the effect as in the example above.
| Generator mode | Expert |
|---|---|
| Prefix | 202 |
| Suffix | Leave empty |
| Allow duplicated codes? | No |
| Allowed characters at the specified position of the generated code |
|
Quick actions
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