Anywhere that you specify a revision number or revision keyword, you can also specify a date inside curly braces “{}”. You can even access a range of changes in the repository using both dates and revisions together!

Here are examples of the date formats that Subversion accepts. Remember to use quotes around any date that contains spaces.

$ svn checkout --revision {2002-02-17}
$ svn checkout --revision {15:30}
$ svn checkout --revision {15:30:00.200000}
$ svn checkout --revision {"2002-02-17 15:30"}
$ svn checkout --revision {"2002-02-17 15:30 +0230"}
$ svn checkout --revision {2002-02-17T15:30}
$ svn checkout --revision {2002-02-17T15:30Z}
$ svn checkout --revision {2002-02-17T15:30-04:00}
$ svn checkout --revision {20020217T1530}
$ svn checkout --revision {20020217T1530Z}
$ svn checkout --revision {20020217T1530-0500}
…

When you specify a date as a revision, Subversion finds the most recent revision of the repository as of that date:

$ svn log --revision {2002-11-28}
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r12 | ira | 2002-11-27 12:31:51 -0600 (Wed, 27 Nov 2002) | 6 lines
…

You can also use a range of dates. Subversion will find all revisions between both dates, inclusive:

$ svn log --revision {2002-11-20}:{2002-11-29}
…

As we pointed out, you can also mix dates and revisions:

$ svn log --revision {2002-11-20}:4040

Users should be aware of a subtlety that can become quite a stumbling-block when dealing with dates in Subversion. Since the timestamp of a revision is stored as a property of the revision—an unversioned, modifiable property—revision timestamps can be changed to represent complete falsifications of true chronology, or even removed altogether. This will wreak havoc on the internal date-to-revision conversion that Subversion performs.