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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 2 November 2013 12:49, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> On 02/11/2013 02:17, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
> +1
>
> Guaranteeing round-trip does seem like a reasonable behaviour to me.

It's been a while since I had to deal seriously with date parsing, but
at the time, emitting microseconds was a fairly surefire way to break
most utilities that nominally supported date parsing. Roundtripping is
good, but interoperability is important too, and as far as I am aware,
microsecond support when parsing is still sketchy with many date
parsing tools.

Ensuring that emitting and consuming microseconds is easy would
definitely be a good thing, but unless general date parsing support
(not just in Python, but in programming utilities in general) has
improved more dramatically in recent years than I believe it has,
emitting microseconds by default would be a backwards compatibility
breach.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia