[Python-Dev] changing time.strftime() to accept 0s (was: User's complaints) (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed Jul 12 04:50:05 CEST 2006

On 7/11/06, skip at pobox.com <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

Brett> That whole entry is a little overblown. Well, sure. Think of it as a bug report with attitude. ;-) Brett> That was done to fix buffer overflow issues when libc Brett> implementations didn't do bound checks on the arguments to Brett> strftime() and would index too far... That special case could simply be recognized and converted into one that works couldn't it? Documented or not, I believe it was the standard idiom for formatting just a date before 2.4. http://python.org/sf/1520914 Keep or toss as you see fit. Seems like breakage that could have been avoided to me though.

Right, but that would have required realizing how to prevent it at the time. =)

I can change it so that 0 is an acceptable value and internally handles defaulting to something reasonable (accepting less than 9 values in the tuple is a separate thing that I don't feel like bothering to implement). It does possibly hide bugs where 0 was not meant to be passed, though.

If people think this is a reasonable thing to change, then Neal and Anthony, do you want it to go into 2.5?

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