Magnus Lycka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > As I've written before, the ISO 8601 spec contains many variations > in date formats. Making a full ISO 8601 parser is probably possible > if we ignore time deltas, but it's hardly worth the effort. Writing > something that parses a few percent of the possible ISO 8601 > messages and calling that an ISO 8601 parser seems silly to me.
The abundance of formats specified by ISO 8601 is indeed a barrier to simple implementation of ISO-8601-consuming methods. In response to this, the IETF have made RFC 3339: "This document defines a date and time format for use in Internet protocols that is a profile of the ISO 8601 standard for representation of dates and times using the Gregorian calendar." <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt> By "profile", the document essentially means a much more limited subset of the myriad formats in ISO 8601, precisely to allow simple conversion of timestamps to and from the format. Could this be a candidate for a "default" consumption format for date-time strings? -- \ "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one | `\ trifling exception, is composed of others." -- John Andrew | _o__) Holmes | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
