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Answer 1

+6 A:

Option 1: Don't change anything. Use time.strptime to parse your timestamps.

Option 2: Change to datetime. You can format the timestamps the same way, and use datetime.strptime to parse them.

It doesn't much matter, since the code will be similar. Searching will involve matching months, days or years or some such. Use time tuples for this. Or datetime.datetime objects. Or, searching will involve comparing ranges of times; use time in seconds for this. Or use datetime objects. They will both work and -- for this -- they will be similar in complexity.

Doing date calculations (90 days in the future, 3 months in the past, etc.) is the strong suit of datetime.

In general, you'll often be happier with datetime because it does more and doesn't involve switching between simple double time and time tuple time.

S.Lott 2010-01-24 15:11:47

Thanks for your great reply. I'll put time going through the datetime documentation.

Morlock 2010-01-24 15:24:50

Answer 2

+8 A:

You might want to consider changing to ISO 8601. Will help with sorting for example, or transferring data between different systems.

Bandi-T 2010-01-24 15:18:19

totally agree. so much more readable and also causes less fuss when using different tools.

pulegium 2010-01-24 16:05:02

I will use ISO 8601 in the journal file, and thanks a log for the suggestion! However, the question really is a question about which python module I should use to deal with dates and time. If you have a way I could implement ISO 8601 with a python module from the standard library, I would be glad to hear about it!Cheers

Morlock 2010-01-24 19:13:43

Here's a question doing the opposite, parsing ISO 8601 in Python using the datetime module: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/969285/how-do-i-translate-a-iso-8601-datetime-string-into-a-python-datetime-object - note the comment on looking at the methods of datetime.datetime instead of the datetime module itself. If you're lucky, you'll find an strftime() function that accepts the same (or very similar) format syntax. I seem to recall I once did something like this, and the only custom thing I had to do was tack on fractional seconds (as they were needed by my application at the time).

Bandi-T 2010-01-24 20:18:21

Don't forget though that Pythons built-in date/time objects are relatively naive, and always assume there's exactly 60 seconds in a minute (3600*24 seconds in a day) - this ignores leap seconds for example.

Bandi-T 2010-01-24 20:27:42

Here's a "Date and Time Representation in Python" from Jochen Voss: http://seehuhn.de/pages/pdate

Bandi-T 2010-01-24 20:38:56

Thanks for the seehuhn link Bandi-T

Morlock 2010-01-24 20:55:48

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Easy to use time-stamps in Python

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