[issue2782] datetime/date strftime() method and time.strftime() inconsistency

[Andrii V. Mishkovskyi]

New submission from Andrii V. Mishkovskyi <mishok13 at gmail.com>:

datetime and date strftime() method does additional check on input
format, thus being completely different from time's module
time.strftime() method behavior.
There are two ways to fix this:
1. Add an explicit note about this behavior (e.g., "only 'str' objects
are allowed for format strings") in docs (section 5.1.7).
2. Allow 'unicode' objects for format strings (backport time.strftime()
from 3.0?).

Here is a traceback for a more complete overview:

Python 2.6a2+ (trunk:62762, May  6 2008, 14:37:27)
[GCC 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from datetime import datetime, date
>>> import time
>>> uformat = u'%Y-%m-%D %H-%M-%S'
>>> format = '%Y-%m-%D %H-%M-%S'
>>> datetime.today().strftime(uformat)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: strftime() argument 1 must be str, not unicode
>>> datetime.today().strftime(format)
'2008-05-05/07/08 17-19-03'
>>> time.strftime(uformat)
'2008-05-05/07/08 17-19-10'
>>> time.strftime(format)
'2008-05-05/07/08 17-19-16'
>>> date.today()
datetime.date(2008, 5, 7)
>>> date.today().strftime(format)
'2008-05-05/07/08 00-00-00'
>>> date.today().strftime(uformat)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: strftime() argument 1 must be str, not unicode

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 66360
nosy: mishok13
severity: normal
status: open
title: datetime/date strftime() method and time.strftime() inconsistency
type: behavior
versions: Python 2.5, Python 2.6

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Tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue2782>
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