Comments on: Trouble Getting a Date

By: David Welden

David Welden — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:22:59 +0000

Glad to know I am not the only one who always trips over this, but I always figured it is because dates are so rarely used in real world programming One of the few ugly warts in Python I don’t like to discuss with the unbelievers. Absolutely this mess needs to be cleaned up, preferably in a new class that consolidates the intended functionality of all of the different standard modules. “Preferably one way to do things”, no?

By: T Middleton

T Middleton — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:28:21 +0000

PostgreSQL has nice “timestamp”, “interval”, “date” and “time” datatypes, and decent functions for date math/manipulation (up to microsecond resolution). I usually do most of my date math/formating inside my postgresql queries for this reason and just have it spit out text for python. Kind of sad in a way, but better than some of your frustration above for my uses.

By: Ira

Ira — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:37:30 +0000

Just to make things a little more confusing, SQL Server has a timestamp data type… but it doesn’t even remotely conform to ANSI/ISO standards. Instead, it’s a synonym for rowversion.

And to confirm, SQL Server only provides datetime (and smalldatetime, half the size but less precision).

By: Mariano

Mariano — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:50:39 +0000

Andy, you need to use “date” or “timestamp” (I think it matters if you write it lowercase or uppercase) as the sqlite’s datatype to make it work (this comes by default in sqlite3 but you can write an adapter/converter to build whatever datatype you want to store).

See sqlite3’s doc for more on this: http://docs.python.org/lib/node348.html

By: Laurence Rowe

Laurence Rowe — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:08:23 +0000

Leave stftime, strptime as they are, any coming from C (or indeed php) expects them to work that way.

The datetime library is great, none of the dbapi drivers I know use mx.DateTime anymore. Add pytz to get timezone support.

If you are working with relational databases, then give SQLAlchemy a try.

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:11:23 +0000

Your blog is not escaping less-than and greater-than characters, so browsers interpret them as strange malformed HTML elements named “type”.

By: Dominic Brooks

Dominic Brooks — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:14:29 +0000

In addition to DATE, Oracle has had TIMESTAMP and INTERVAL since 9i.
Doesn’t make things any easier for you though.

By: Andy Todd

Andy Todd — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:53:53 +0000

Mariano, I didn't know about PARSE_DECLTYPES so I added it to my sample code above, and got a nice error message when I tried to retrieve my data;

n [17]: curs.execute("SELECT * FROM date_test")
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Traceback (most recent call last)

~/Work/Python/ in ()

/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/sqlite3/dbapi2.py in convert_date(val)
     61
     62     def convert_date(val):
---> 63         return datetime.date(*map(int, val.split("-")))
     64
     65     def convert_timestamp(val):

By: Mariano

Mariano — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:41:15 +0000

Umm it seems it doesn’t get print, anyway give it a try

By: Mariano

Mariano — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:39:56 +0000

Sorry, I missed the output from print type(r[0]):

type(r[0])