[Tutor] cookie expiration date format

[Mike Hansen]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tutor-bounces at python.org 
> [mailto:tutor-bounces at python.org] On Behalf Of Luke Paireepinart
> Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 8:31 PM
> To: Tim Johnson
> Cc: tutor at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Tutor] cookie expiration date format
> 
> Tim Johnson wrote:
> > Hi:
> > I want to be able to expire a cookie programmatically.
> > In other languages, I just set the expiration date to 'yesterday'.
> > If I look at the documentation at:
> > http://docs.python.org/lib/node644.html
> > for the Cookie object, I see the following:
> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> > expires
> >     Integer expiry date in seconds since epoch,
> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> > I'm not clear what datatype is needed here.
> > Can anyone clarify this for me?
> >   
> Sounds like it's an integer or float, such as returned by time.time()
>  >>> import time
>  >>> time.time()
> 1174098190.796 #seconds since epoch
>  >>> _ / 60
> 19568303.179933332#minutes since epoch
>  >>> _ / 60
> 326138.3863322222 #hours ..
>  >>> _ / 24
> 13589.099430509259# days
>  >>> _ / 365.25
> 37.204926572236161 #years
>  >>> .205 * 1.2
> 0.24599999999999997  #months ( fractional part of year )
>  >>>
> 
> So today is 37 years 2.5 months from January 1, 1970.
> 1970 + 37 = 2007, and January 1 + 2.5 months = March 16.
> 
> If you wanted the cookie to expire 24 hours from now,
> time.time() + 3600 * 24 #(seconds in a day)
> 
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_epoch for more info on 
> the epoch.
> look into the time and the datetime modules, there should be 
> an easy way 
> to find the seconds since epoch for whatever date you want.
> HTH,
> -Luke

Some of the modules in the Python standard library make things a little
more difficult than other languages.(Perl, Ruby, ...) This is a good
example of it. Are there any 3rd party modules that let you set the
expiration date to 'yesterday'? I know I could write a wrapper, but I'd
rather not re-invent the wheel and save some time.

Another example is ftplib. Other language's ftp modules/libraries allow
you do something like sendaciifile(fh) or sendbinaryfile(fh) yet you
need to build your own wrapper functions in Python.
http://effbot.org/librarybook/ftplib.htm 

Mike