[Python-Dev] Make _strptime only time.strptime implementation? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Fri, 09 May 2003 20:35:46 -0400

[Brett]

> > I got a single email from someone asking me to change the > > functionality so that it would raise an exception if part of the > > input string was not parsed. > [Guido van Rossum] > That sounds like a good idea on the face of it. Or will this break > existing code?

[Brett]

Maybe. If they depend on some specific behavior on a platform that offers it, then yes, there could be issues. But since the docs are so vague if it does break code it will most likely be because someone didn't follow the warnings in the spec.

If you add some flag to control this behavior, defaulting to strict, then at least people who rely on the old (non-strict) behavior can use the flag rather than redesign their application.

And while we are on this subject, does anyone have any issues if I cause strptime to recognize UTC and GMT as timezones? The Solaris box I always use to do libc strptime comparisons to does not recognize it as an acceptable value for %Z, but since it is a known fact that neither have daylight savings I feel strptime should recognize this fact and set the daylight savings value to 0 insteading of raising an error saying it doesn't know about that timezone.

Any objections to the change?

Go for it.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)