I see a need for this patch - I've had to write "datetime(*(time.strptime(date_string, format)[0:6]))" far too many times. I don't understand the C API well enough to check if reference counts are handled properly, but otherwise the implementation looks straight forward. Documentation looks good and the test passes on my machine. Two suggestions: 1. In the time module, the strptime() function's format parameter is optional. For consistency's sake, I'd expect datetime.strptime()'s format parameter also to be optional. (On the other hand, the default value for the format is not very useful.) 2. Since strftime is supported by datetime.time, datetime.date and datetime.datetime, I'd also expect strptime to be supported by all three classes. Could you add that now, or would it be better to do it as a separate patch? Alan. -- Alan Green alan.green@cardboard.nu - http://cardboard.nu