I'm looking for a solution (or ideas about a solution) to the problem that strftime(3) and strptime(3) don't understand time increments of less than one second. Most operating systems can provide times with subsecond resolution and like Python I'm pretty sure Ruby, Perl and Tcl have objects or packages that can manipulate such times in a sane manner. I'm casting my net to a broader community than just Python (where I generally hang out) to see if/how others have addressed this problem.
Here's my typical use case. I generate log files with subsecond resolution using Python's datetime module. By default it generates printable timestamps in an ISO format that includes fractions of seconds, e.g., "2005-01-14 18:56:54.546607". I often need to parse such times, and therein lies the rub. Python's date parsing is based on strptime(3) which can't handle fractions of seconds. I wind up worming around the problem with a little hackery, but it bothers me that given an otherwise complete solution to formatting and parsing times I can't handle this common (for me) case. I realize that other languages may not base their current time formatting and parsing on strftime(3) and strptime(3), but I suspect those two functions were at least the root of what is commonly used by most languages. In my investigation I came across a DateTime module in Perl that uses "%N" (or optionally "%nN" where n is a digit) to identify integers as nanoseconds or some other subsecond time. I belive "%3N" would cause "123" to be interpreted as 123 milliseconds, for instance. I've considered extending "%S" to accept fractional seconds or adding a new format specifier like "%F" to handle this case. I'm interested to know what solutions have been devised or considered for other languages. (Has this been addressed in some more recent version of the C or C++ standards I'm unaware of?) Rather than reinventing the wheel I'd like to adopt an existing solution if possible. At the very least I'd like to know how others have approached the problem. I think there's an opportunity to add some value that everyone can take advantage of. Thanks for your time, Skip Montanaro [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
