On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:21 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, January 9, 2014 9:57:57 AM UTC-5, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> And months are more
>> complicated still, so it's probably easiest to use strftime:
>>
>> >>> time.strftime("%Y%m",time.gmtime(ts))
>>
>> '201401'
>
> strftime is a non-starter at far as "easy" goes. I don't know about you, but
> I certainly haven't memorized the table of all the format specifiers. Is
> month "m" or "M"? What's "%U" or "%B". Every time I use strftime, I have to
> go pull up the docs and read the table. Not to mention that "%z" is not
> available on all platforms, and "%s" (which is incredibly useful) is not even
> documented (I suspect it's also not available on all platforms).
>
Have you ever used a regular expression? Does it bother you that both
percent-formatting and str.format() have compact/cryptic
mini-languages? Why is it a problem to have a mini-language for
formatting dates? It at least follows a measure of common sense,
unlike the PHP date function. In fact, I've given end users the
ability to enter strftime strings (eg to construct a filename), and
it's worked just fine. *Non-programmers* can figure them out without
much difficulty.
ChrisA
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