Re: [Python-ideas] Top 10 Python modules that need a redesign Was: Geo coordinates conversion in stdlib

5 Apr 2015

      On 2015-04-05 01:45, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
...
On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 7:28 PM, MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com 
mailto:python@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
    I am genuinely interested in the ways to improve date/time
    formatting in
    Python.  There are certainly better ways than stftime.  For
    example, ICU
    has a date/time format syntax that is much more readable:
    instead of
    "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", ICU format is "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss".

    I don't think it is hard to find a way to introduce ICU format in
    datetime.__format__ while preserving backward compatibility.  For
    example, we may require that % is always "escaped" as '%' in
    ICU format
    and the presence of unescaped % can trigger strftime
    interpretation.

    [1] http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/datetime

Personally, I prefer some kind of escaping, possibly in the style of
.format, e.g. "{year}-{month}-{day} {hour}:{minute}:{second}". (It'll
probably need a little tinkering to shorten it! :-))

Can someone explain to me why something like this or Anatoly's 
double-curly-brace variant is an improvement over
...
...
...
from datetime import *
"{0.year}-{0.month}-{0.day}
{0.hour}:{0.minute}:{0.second}".format(datetime.now())
'2015-4-4 20:43:23'
Maybe it just needs the addition of attributes for '%A' and '%a' (name 
of day) and '%B' and '%b' (name of month).