Alternative to strptime()?

[Mio Nino Marquez]

One tool we're using here uses Python as the scripting tool.
Admittedly, Python is *alien* to us...
We have a problem whereby we'd like to convert a date-formatted string into
a Tuple so that we can pass it to either time.localtime() or time.strftime()
Seems like strftime() is the answer, but strftime() appears to be not
working in Win32. Is there any other way to do it?

Please help.

TIA
--
Mio Nino P. Marquez