[Zope3-dev] datetimeutils: add localize datetime?

[Sidnei da Silva]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 07:12:25AM -0500, Stephan Richter wrote:
| On Tuesday 01 February 2005 07:00, Sidnei da Silva wrote:
| > It looks like it extensible enough to handle the funkiest date
| > strings, and has full support for timezones, even reading timezone
| > info from .ics (iCalendar) files and from timezone files on
| > the operating system.
| 
| Any parser not based on locales is not acceptable for a server-system like 
| Zope. The ICU system, which we use, originated out of years of experience 
| with Java at Sun and IBM. 
| 
| How would the Parser handle:
| 
| "Dienstag, 1. Februar 2005 12:01:00"
| "Jeudi, Fevrier 1, 2005"
| 
| Parsers should really just accept datetimes that you want them to accept. 
| There is an inherent ambiguity. For example, it became fashion in the US 
| (sigh) to use the dot for dates sometimes. So is "1.2.2005" January 2nd, 2005 
| or February 1st, 2005?
| 
| BTW, I will veto (as much as I can) any inclusion of such guessin g functions. 
| It is just not right.

It's not just guessing-based. It has documented behaviour [1] and tests,
and the parsing is pluggable [2], which I think it's a must for any such
functionality.

We could write a parserinfo adapter or utility that would use the ICU
to handle non-US date strings.

Gustavo is usually hanging out on #zope3-dev under the nick
'niemeyer', so I'm sure he would be pleased to help us with this.

Seems like there was a long thread [3] on python-dev about inclusion of
dateutil in the std lib, not sure about the outcome though.

[1] https://moin.conectiva.com.br/DateUtil#head-fe951d30a583390a274f57d3e881611e5ae207a5

[2] parserinfo
    This parameter allows one to change how the string is parsed, by
    using a different parserinfo class instance. Using it you may, for
    example, intenationalize the parser strings, or make it ignore
    additional words.

[3] http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/python-dev/2022022

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