"Thomas W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > I'm developing a web-application where the user sometimes has to enter > dates in plain text, allthough a format may be provided to give clues. > On the server side this piece of text has to be parsed into a datetime > python-object. Does anybody have any pointers on this? > > Besides the actual parsing, my main concern is the different locale > date formats and how to be able to parse those strange us-like > "month/day/year" compared to the clever and intuitive european-style > "day/month/year" etc. > > I've searched google, but haven't found any good referances that helped > me solve this problem, especially with regards to the locale date > format issues.
There is no easy answer if you want to be able to enter three numbers. There are two answers that work, although there will be a lot of complaining. One is to use the international yyyy-mm-dd form, and the other is to accept a 4 digit year, an alphabetic month and a two digit day in any order. Otherwise, if you get 4 digits as the first component, and it passes your validation (whatever that is) for reasonable years, you're probably pretty safe to assume that you've got yyyy-mm-dd. Otherwise if you can't get a clean answser (one is > 31, one is 12 < x < 32 and one is <= 12, just give them a list of possibilities and politely suggest that they enter it as yyyy-mm-dd next time. I don't validate separators. As long as there is something that isn't a number or a letter, it's a separator and which one doesn't matter. At times I've even taken the transition between a digit and a letter as a separator. John Roth > Best regards, > Thomas > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
