Python Split usage

Question

I'm cocking this up and it should be really simple but the value of sortdate is none (note im only doing this because converting a string to a date in Python is a bugger).

DateToPass = str(self.request.get('startdate'))
mybreak.startdate = DateToPass
faf = DateToPass.split('-')
sortdate = str(faf[2] + faf[1] + faf[0])

That should work? but its just being stored as null though the datetopass is being stored fine.

Answer 1

If the real issue is converting a string to a time, as you have indicated, then have you looked into time.strptime?

Answer 2

It would be helpful to see what self.request.get('startdate') looked like. Is it ISO (YYYY-MM-DD)? If so I'll show an example using datetime. There's no need for splits because of datetime.datetime.strptime:

>>> import datetime
>>> date_to_pass = '2010-05-07'
>>> sortdate = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_to_pass, '%Y-%m-%d')
>>> sortdate
datetime.datetime(2010, 5, 7, 0, 0)

Datetime objects are sortable, so there's no need to convert to a string. Unless I'm missing the point of your question.

Answer 3

If your input date is in the format 'YYYY-MM-DD' then the code you have shold work fine. There are a few extraneous str() calls, and yeah, it'd be more proper to use strptime, but nothing that should break.

For example, this works:

Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Apr 15 2008, 11:28:25)
[GCC 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-9)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> startdate = '2002-04-20'
>>> splitdate = startdate.split('-')
>>> type(splitdate[0])
<type 'str'>
>>> splitdate[2]+splitdate[1]+splitdate[0]
'20042002'

So the two places I'd look are:

1. What is the format you get from self.request.get('startdate') and store in DateToPass?
2. You haven't shown us the code where you store sortdate. Is it broken?