Handling international dates in python

Question

I have a date that is either in German for e.g,

2. Okt. 2009

and also perhaps as

2. Oct. 2009

How do I convert this into an ISO datetime (or Python datetime)?

Solved by using this snippet:

for l in locale.locale_alias:
    worked = False
    try:
        locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, l)
        worked = True
    except:
        worked = False
    if worked: print l

And then plugging in the appropriate for the parameter l in setlocale.

Can parse using

import datetime
print datetime.datetime.strptime("09. Okt. 2009", "%d. %b. %Y")

Answer 1

http://docs.python.org/library/locale.html

The datetime module is already locale-aware.

It's something like the following

# German locale
loc = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, ("de","de"))
try:
     date = datetime.date.strptime(input, "%d. %b. %Y")
except:
     # English locale
     loc = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, ("en","us"))
     date = datetime.date.strptime(input, "%d. %b. %Y")
        

Answer 2

Very minor point about your code snippet: I'm no Python expert but I'd consider the whole "flag to check for success + silently swallowing all exceptions" to be bad style.

try/expect/else does what you want in a cleaner way, I think:

for l in locale.locale_alias:
    try:
        locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, l)
    except locale.Error: # the doc says setlocale should throw this on failure
        pass
    else:
        print l