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

Gerrit gerrit at nl.linux.org
Sat Mar 13 11:01:07 EST 2004

Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:

Some people claim that this is "dangerous", since there are ambiguous dates, like "03-03-03".

I don't think 03-03-03 is very ambigious, maybe 03-04-05 would be a better example ;-)

In my opinion, this is completely non-sense, since dateutil's parsing routine has a well defined, documented, and simple behavior. If you're parsing US dates, the default is ok. If you're parsing brazilian dates, pass it "dayfirst=1" and you're done. What other ways would you parse it!?

Year first, perhaps, but I think it would be yyyy-mm-dd instead of yy-mm-dd then. But perhaps it would be nice to enable a (surpressable, of course) warning when a date is multi-parsable...?

Ahh.. of course. Perhaps you'd prefer to say "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z" than "dayfirst=1", since it's a lot more obvious what you're parsing, isn't it? ;-)

It may be faster.

Gerrit.

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