# Data Types The following data types are used throughout the Squirro platform: ## JSON All APIs support the input and output of JSON data. JSON is a text format to represent simple data structures. Libraries to read and write JSON data are available for almost all programming languages. See the extensive table on [http://json.org/](http://json.org/). For more information about JSON, see [JSON on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON). ## Date and Time Date/time values are always in UTC in the format `YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss` (e.g. `1997-07-16T19:20:30`). Reference: For more information, see [Date Format](date-format.md#data-loading-date-format). ## Language Code Language codes are always a 2-character long lower-case string (e.g. `en`, `de`, `ar`). For more information, see: - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1) ## Unique Identifier Unique identifiers are generated as 22-character long case-sensitive strings (e.g. `fD9EDV2YROG7pSkBa-hLPg`). ## Geographical Location Geographical locations include latitude followed by longitude and can be expressed as: - Single point: string with latitude and longitude as floating point numbers (separated by comma), e.g. `47.374463,8.52375`. - Rectangle: string with latitude and longitude as floating point numbers (separated by comma) of the top-left and bottom-right corner (separated by semi-colon), e.g. `47.374463,8.52375;47.374015,8.524908`. For more information, see: - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system) ## HTML String Formatted content is represented as HTML. When dealing with such content, special characters must be escaped. Most programming languages provide utilities for this, such as Python with the `cgi.escape` function.