Pyttles

I want to be able to parse a date and time string for the locale set in the user's system using forced indentation. I also want it to be flexible so it first tries to parse a full date and time, if that fails it tries full date with hours and minutes and lastly just a date in case the user doesn't want to specify the time or doesn't want to bother with seconds.
Neither time.strptime nor datetime.datetime.strptime seems to care about locale settings on my system (on the other hand, strftime for both modules does). What is this bullshit? Should I just force the users to wrap their heads around ISO 8601?

Yes. It's not like ISO 8601 is hard.
If your users are really stupid you can give them some dropdown boxes or that Windows date pick thing.

Not that it helps you at all, Cocoa's date parser knows how to parse "a week ago at dinner time".

Unfortunately, they decided not to bother with anything like that in Python. See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0321/

>>3
Yeah, because that works in spanish, russian, chinese, and Lojban too. Enjoy your niche market.

>>5
English is the international lingua franca, and is therefore more important than any of the languages you listed.

>>6
Shut up, Cudder.

>>2
8601 is simple, but I prefer the YYYYMMDDHHmmSS format.

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-locale.html

>>1
Don't. Don't make your program try to parse several kinds of dates, that's just going to cause problems.

I hate having to guess if applications want dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy. I don't even know what my locale says about dates right now. Don't trust the user's locale for anything other than timezones; odds are that it's not going to be 100% accurate and it's just going to make the user confused ("What kind of date do you want, again?").

This is one of the few cases where it's better to force the user to adapt instead of trying to make the program "user friendly."

Just pick one date format and stick with it. Use a reminder next to the field (something like yyyy-mm-dd) or use dropdowns/calendars if you must.

>>10
How did you know I am the guy that RAGES when he is repeated?

>>11
You might want to set up some iptables rules for your anus, then.

>>10
Use a sensible date format such as "1 March 2008", or "1st of March, 2008".[1]

http://chrisdone.com/requests-for-web-authors#H2.Useful-Date-Time

YYYYMMMMdddd

Lain.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

bampu pantsu