Saturday, July 25, 2009

Datestring

Well, this is annoying (but complete, at least). I've been able to convert longs to Python DateTime Objects based on a frequency, but what about outputting them? It would be nice to have a function that could print out the date in a readable format, no? Unfortunately, there's a few problems with this seemingly trivial process.

First off, there's a lot of different ways to print the date. Do we print the weekday? If so, where do we print it? Do we print months first, or years first, or days first? I realize most of this has become "standardized" (whatever that means these days...) but with so many possibilities, it's difficult to create a "perfect" format that could satisfy anyone.

The second (real) problem is that PyStrings are horrible with formatting. There's a function in the Python C - API called PyString_FromFormat() which works very similarly to printf(). It does not, unfortunately, work similarly enough. PyString_FromFormat() completely ignores any minimum length formats and precisions placed on the input data. If I want to print a YYYY-MM-DD string format with exactly four numbers for years, 2 for months, and 2 for days, I can't do that without formatting the strings myself (in C). Is this catastrophic? No. But it's certainly annoying...

And to finish off, a quick aside: standardizing years at 4 digits is a bad idea. What about years post 9999? Maybe someone in some scientific research lab is going to grow really old (cryogenic technology is advancing fairly steadily, after all...). But years below 1000 look... awkward in a YYYY-MM-DD format (which is the current one the tests are written for...).

Oh, and Python DateTime has a printing method of it's own:
>>> print datetime.datetime.now()
2009-07-25 03:55:31.884781
>>> print datetime.datetime(999,1,1)
0999-01-01 00:00:00
>>> print datetime.datetime(10001,1,1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
ValueError: year is out of range

See? They standardize at YYYY and error out above the year 9999... but of course none of this is available on the C end (as far as I can tell), so this is of little use to me... Besides, NumPy should be able to handle dates above 9999. It's the principle of the thing.

Also, sorry to Matt Knox about not reading your comment until now. That calculation would have saved me a lot of time (and blood pressure). I didn't have the blog set up to email me when people commented. I do now. Thank you, again.

2 comments:

  1. There was some work done in 1.3 to avoid the PyString formatting, the localization was messing things up. David C and Pauli worked on it.

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  2. Look up ISO 8601 for date and time output format convention.

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