On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Eric Smith wrote: ..

Is strftime really so complex that we shouldn't just write our own? I'd be willing to do it. Over the years the platform strftime has caused any number of problems. The last time I looked at it we already have to do some work pre-parsing the format string and passing it off to platform strftime, so it's not like it's not already a maintenance hassle.

This is the subject of issue 3173: http://bugs.python.org/issue3173 As far as I can tell, the main problem with implementing strftime is that it has to be locale aware and locale API is as inconsistent/buggy across platforms as strftime itself.

I understand strptime is probably more complex and there's some value to having strptime/strftime coming from the same library. But I'd be willing to look at it, too.

strptime is already implemented (in pure python) by stdlib, but it piggybacks on strftime for locale information. See Lib/_strptime.py.