The other day I needed to convert a date like "August 2009" into a "seconds-since-epoch" value (this would be for the first day of that month, at the first second of that day).
In Python, I came up with this: ~~~~ #!/usr/bin/env python import datetime import time time_in_sse = time.mktime( datetime.datetime(2009, 8, 1).timetuple() ) print time_in_sse ~~~~ I *wanted* to just use time.mktime(), but it wouldn't work unless I could specify the *complete* time tuple value (who would have all that handy?!). I also wanted to then just do datetime.datetime (...).secs_since_epoch(), but it didn't support a function like that -- not one I could find anyway. Note, to arrive at that above solution, I had to spend a fair amount of time reading the docs on both the time and datetime modules, and then wondering why the methods I wanted weren't there. Am I missing something and maybe used the wrong methods/modules here? Contrast this to Perl, where the solution I came up with in about 5 minutes was: ~~~~ #!/usr/bin/env perl use DateTime; my $dt = DateTime->new(year => 2009, month => 8); print $dt->epoch, "\n"; ~~~~ (it only took 5 minutes because the docs for DateTime tell you exactly what you want to know right at the top on the first page of the docs.) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list