[Python-Dev] dateutil (original) (raw)

Gustavo Niemeyer niemeyer at conectiva.com
Thu Mar 11 12:54:56 EST 2004

Hello Skip!

There is another module loose in the wild which handles recurring dates: [...]

Being a carefully developed superset (as it offers more features and less restrictions) of the iCal RFC regarding RRULEs, I belive you won't find any equivalent work (in terms of speed and functionality).

http://www.aminus.org/rbre/python/recur.py http://www.aminus.org/rbre/python/testrecur.py

Since this is an area which has had very little attention I'd like to see if there are ideas in one or both modules which can be used to arrive at a "one true solution" to this problem. In fact, it's a significant enough problem all on its own that I suspect it might be worth separating out from other (simpler?) date manipulations.

Every example may be easily implemented with dateutil's rrule, as the above module is a simple implementation of interval based recurrences. As a counter example, rrule is able to do something like:

rrule(FREQ_YEARLY,bymonth=8,bymonthday=13,byweekday=FR)

Meaning "dates with a friday 13th in august", for example. Notice that this is also a simple one. There are more complex ones involving cross-year weekly periods with random week starting dates and ISO week numbers, for example.

-- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net

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