Comments on: Python Date Manipulation

By: Ben Sizer

Ben Sizer — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:48:47 +0000

I have nothing useful to add except that I agree it’s a bit confusing, that I personally think the modules should be consolidated and improved somewhat, and I raised this point on comp.lang.python almost 7 years ago.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/f1fe5bd5e1f8d8ba/

If nothing else, you might find some of the discussion interesting as it talks about why datetime ended up the way that it did.

By: m0j0

m0j0 — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:51:53 +0000

The article mentions dateutil, but to reiterate what was said there, I shouldn’t really need to have yet another third-party module to perform these operations. It’s not that they’re not supported per se, it’s that they’re not presented in as straightforward manner as I (and many others I gather) would like.

By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:38:27 +0000

Very much want to confirm the previous suggestion to look at http://labix.org/python-dateutil
for a good tested utility.

By: Eric G

Eric G — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:41:07 +0000

The two main issues I have with python date and time are fairly basic.

1) With 3 separate modules, as much as they share a common interface, there’s enough difference to cause some annoyance at times. Not to mention that often enough you will need to import more than one to get the job done any ways. I would prefer them to be concentrated into one module or even better one object to reduce API confusion and otherwise unnecessary statements to combine them.

2) strptime. I’ll admit it’s better than nothing, but invariably I find myself trying to account for “/” vs “-” in dates as well as datetimes vs dates vs times with a series of try/excepts (which I really think look “ugly” but unavoidable at times). I know I could filter all that in the interface but sometimes you’re dealing with raw input that you can’t control. Ideally it should recognize the most common date and time formats without intervention or ambiguity. I know that’s a tall order but that is what would make things easier for me and possibly allow free form date and time entries for users.

Maybe my ideas are off base and completely wrong. Just my two cents.

By: itsadok

itsadok — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 05:51:52 +0000

The article at http://seehuhn.de/pages/pdate has some good advice about using dates in python. Namely, stick to the datetime module and convert everything else into a datetime object as soon as possible.

Still, timezone is not really handled easily with python. I’m still waiting for somebody to port joda-time or JSR-310 to python.