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?

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