On Fri, 21 Nov 2014 10:20:06 +0000, Mark Lawrence wrote: > On 21/11/2014 08:50, Gary Herron wrote: >> On 11/21/2014 12:35 AM, Steve Hayes wrote: >>> I've finally found a use for Python. >>> >>> When, in the course of my genealogy research, I look at census or >>> burial records, I often want to work out a person's date of birth from >>> their age. >>> It's a simple matter of mental arithmetic, but I sometimes get it >>> wrong, and mislead myself. There are calculators and date calculation >>> programs, >>> but they are usually too complicated and try to do too much, so by the >>> time you've worked out what to do it takes much longer. >>> >>> This Python script does it for me. >>> >>> year = input("Year: ") >>> age = input("Age: ") >>> born = year-age print 'Year of birth:', born >>> >>> It's so simple, so elementary, that it's not really worth writing >>> about, except for the fact that it illustrates the KISS principle. >>> >>> It is sometimes better to have a simple program that does one thing >>> well than a complex one that does lots of things, but none of them >>> very efficiently. >>> >>> The average hand calculator can do the same job, but you have to pick >>> it up and put it down, and you can't easily see if you've made a typo. >>> >>> Having said that, however, yes, I would perhaps like to use Python for >>> more complicated date processing routines, namely to convert the kinds >>> of dates produced by genealogy programs to a simple yyyy-mm-dd that >>> computer database programs can understand, so that "Abt May 1677" >>> would be rendered as "1677-05-00" >>> >>> Has anyone done something like that in Python? >>> >>> >>> >>> >> The datetime module has lots of capabilities including the several you >> mention. >> >> See https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html >> >> Gary Herron >> >> > As we're now firmly heading into the Python 3 era would people please be > kind enough to use the Python 3 links. I know it's only a single > character change but it's the principle to me. TIA.
I think this was because the OP is clearly using python 2 he may be better of moving to python 3 but providing links to documents of his current version is probably more helpful than providing python 3 links-in this case -- Martin was probably ripping them off. That's some family, isn't it? Incest, prostitution, fanaticism, software. -- Charles Willeford, "Miami Blues" -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list