the Gravity of Python 2

[Roy Smith]

On Thursday, January 9, 2014 9:57:57 AM UTC-5, Chris Angelico wrote:


> And months are more
> complicated still, so it's probably easiest to use strftime:
> 
> >>> time.strftime("%Y%m",time.gmtime(ts))
> 
> '201401'

strftime is a non-starter at far as "easy" goes.  I don't know about you, but I certainly haven't memorized the table of all the format specifiers.  Is month "m" or "M"?  What's "%U" or "%B".  Every time I use strftime, I have to go pull up the docs and read the table.  Not to mention that "%z" is not available on all platforms, and "%s" (which is incredibly useful) is not even documented (I suspect it's also not available on all platforms).

> So what I'm seeing here is that the direct use of a time_t will cover
> everything in an ugly way, but that a class wrapping it up could fix
> that. And fundamentally, the only problem with datetime (which, for
> the most part, is exactly that wrapper) is that it's unobvious how to
> get a simple UTC timestamp.
> 
> Has the unobviousness been solved by a simple recipe? And if so,
> should that tip be added to the datetime module docs somewhere?

No, it would be solved by a built-in method.  Recipes are a cop-out.  If something is complicated enough to require a recipe, and used frequently enough to be worth writing that recipe up and documenting it, you might as well have gone the one additional step and made it a method.