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What is pyfdate?
Given Python's goal to be a powerful and easy-to-use scripting
language, its features for working with dates and times are not as
user-friendly as they should be. The purpose of pyfdate is to remedy that
situation by providing features for working with dates and times that are as
powerful and easy-to-use as the rest of Python.
Pyfdate doesn't attempt to be all things to all people:
rather, its goal is to make it easy to do 95% if the things that people want to
do with dates and times.
Pyfdate provides two classes:
- Time — A specific point in time, identified by
year, month, day, hour, minute, second. Provides easy-to-use date/time
arithmetic and date/time formatting functions. (Python's datetime module calls
this a "datetime".)
- Period — An amount of time. (Python's datetime
module calls this a "timedelta".)
What kinds of things does pyfdate not do?
- Pyfdate doesn't provide any facilities for parsing strings
to extract date/time information.
- The smallest unit of time that Pyfdate can handle is a
second. It cannot be used to work with hundredths or thousandths of
seconds.
- Pyfdate doesn't know anything about timezones.
- Pyfdate doesn't know anything about daylight savings
time.
International Language Support
One of pyfdate's goals is to support languages other than
American English.
When it is imported, pyfdate tries to import another file
called pyfdate_local.py. If pyfdate_local.py is not available, the
language for displaying dates and times (e.g. weekday names and month names) is
American English. If pyfdate_local.py is available, the language for displaying
dates and times is taken from that file.
Local files are available for a number of languages. For
example: pyfdate_local_francais.py for French,
pyfdate_local_deutsch.py for German, etc.
To use the file for language <language>, simply
copy pyfdate_local_<language>.py to pyfdate_local.py. And
of course, you may customize pyfdate_local.py for any language of your
choice.
When Python 3 is released, all code will be in Unicode, and
pyfdate's international language support should improve.
In the mean time, if you make improvements to one of pyfdate's
language modules (or create a new one) and wish to share it with others, send
it to me and I will post it here.
What is pyfdate's status?
Pyfdate is still in beta status.
Once pyfdate is shaken down a bit, if people find it useful
enough, I will put it into a SourceForge project.
Disclaimer
We have done our best to provide bug-free software and
documentation, but nobody is perfect so (cue the usual legal disclaimers): use
at your own risk; we're not responsible if the software malfunctions, your hard
disk crashes, the dog eats your homework, or the sky falls, etc. etc.
On the other hand, if you find a bug and report it, we'll try
to fix it ASAP.
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