[Python-ideas] Making datetime __str__ and isoformat more consistent

[Mark Lawrence]

On 01/11/2013 21:29, Ethan Furman wrote:
> On 11/01/2013 01:37 PM, MRAB wrote:
>> On 01/11/2013 19:49, Ethan Furman wrote:
>>> On 11/01/2013 11:15 AM, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>>>>
>>>> http://bugs.python.org/issue19475
>>>>
>>>> Do others agree with me that consistency in this situation is better
>>>> than
>>>> the current behavior?
>>>
>>> I haven't seen the arguments in favor of this awkward behavior, so I
>>> may change my mind, but at the moment I would
>>> certainly argue for consistency: either emit microseconds in __str__
>>> or ignore remaining microseconds or ignore a
>>> trailing %f (or all three ;) .
>>>
>> Suppose there were, say, 900000 microseconds, i.e. 0.9 seconds?
>>
>> If the microseconds aren't shown by __str__, should it truncate or
>> round?
>
> My first (and preferred) option was to emit the microseconds (even if 0).
>
> At the heart of this issue is: If datetime.datetime is not going to
> always emit the microseconds, then there should be an easy roundtrip
> method to get the value back; currently there is not.
>
> Maybe the best fix is to make the csv module smarter about how it
> outputs datetime's (so it would always emit microseconds).
>
> --
> ~Ethan~

The first solution if anything please, the latter is the road to hell. 
"You've done it for datetime objects, so why not xyz?".  "A similar 
thing was done to the csv module, so why not the ijk module?".

-- 
Python is the second best programming language in the world.
But the best has yet to be invented.  Christian Tismer

Mark Lawrence