[Python-Dev] Make _strptime only time.strptime implementation?

[Guido van Rossum]

[Brett]
> > > I got a single email from someone asking me to change the
> > > functionality so that it would raise an exception if part of the
> > > input string was not parsed.
> >
[Guido van Rossum]
> > That sounds like a good idea on the face of it.  Or will this break
> > existing code?

[Brett]
> Maybe.  If they depend on some specific behavior on a platform that offers
> it, then yes, there could be issues.  But since the docs are so vague if
> it does break code it will most likely be because someone didn't follow
> the warnings in the spec.

If you add some flag to control this behavior, defaulting to strict,
then at least people who rely on the old (non-strict) behavior can use
the flag rather than redesign their application.

> And while we are on this subject, does anyone have any issues if I cause
> _strptime to recognize UTC and GMT as timezones?  The Solaris box I always
> use to do libc strptime comparisons to does not recognize it as an
> acceptable value for %Z, but since it is a known fact that neither have
> daylight savings I feel _strptime should recognize this fact and set the
> daylight savings value to 0 insteading of raising an error saying it
> doesn't know about that timezone.
> 
> Any objections to the change?

Go for it.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)