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

[Andrew Barnert]

On Apr 5, 2015, at 06:13, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 2015-04-05 01:45, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 7:28 PM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com <mailto:python at 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).

It probably needs most of the fields in strftime. While some of them may only be there because one guy at one Unix company needed it one time, things like 12-hour time and AM/PM, tz offset, month abbreviation, week number, etc. are not exactly rare, just a little uncommon; it would less than ideal to write most of your program with format, but have to fall back to strftime a couple times with a comment explaining that datetime is insufficient. (On the other hand, it is nice that you can do things like 0 prefix the same as any other format element, instead of needing to remember separate codes for with and without prefix.)


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