On 3/8/2017 11:01 AM, Francesco Franchina wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm shortly writing to you about a reflection I lately made upon the
current functioning of __str__ for the time's class.
Before expressing my thought and proposal, I want to make sure we all
agree on a simple and clear fact:
the __str__ magic method is used to give a literal and human-readable
representation to the object (unlike __repr__).
Generally this is true across the python panorama. It's not true for the
time class, for example.
/
>>> import time
>>> a = time.localtime()
>>> a.__str__()
'time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=16,
tm_min=6, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=67, tm_isdst=0)'/
Well, don't get me wrong: the main aim of the __str__ method has been
accomplished but, imho, not in the most pythonic way.
I just wanted to ask you: what do you think about re-writing the __str__
of the time class so it would return something like
ISO 8601 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>] format? Wouldn't it be more
meaningful? Especially in the JS-everywhere-era
it could be more more productive.
*TL;DR*
__str__ for dates should return a human-readable date format (eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>)
I'm waiting for your opinions.
Thank you for your time and ideas!
I don't think we can change __str__ at this point, but I'd support
adding __format__ to make this easier to control. Presumably it would
just call strftime.
Eric.
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