On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Wincent <ronggui.hu...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thanks. > > I fetch data from social networking sites and want to mark the time of > access. I store all the information in a redis database, which converts > everything into strings and I need to convert those strings back to original > python objects when analyzing the data.
The easiest way, imho, is to store Unix times - simply the number of seconds since 1970, as an integer or float. That can easily and safely be turned into a string and back (floats might lose a little accuracy, depending on how you do it, but the difference will be a small fraction of a second). >>> time.time() 1352176547.787 >>> time.gmtime(1352176547.787) time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=4, tm_min=35, tm_sec=47, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=311, tm_isdst=0) Easy and unambiguous. Also compact, which may or may not be a selling point. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
