Parsing text into dates?

[Mike Meyer]

"Thomas W" <thomas.weholt at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm developing a web-application where the user sometimes has to enter
> dates in plain text, allthough a format may be provided to give clues.
> On the server side this piece of text has to be parsed into a datetime
> python-object. Does anybody have any pointers on this?

Why are you making it possible for the users to screw this up? Don't
give them a text widget to fill in and you have to figure out what the
format is, give them three widgets so you *know* what's what.

In doing that, you can also go to dropdown widgets for month, with
month names (in a locale appropriate for the page language), and for
the days in the month. For the latter, you can use JScript to get the
number of days in the list right, but make sure you fill it in with a
full 31 in case the user has JScript disabled. Finally, if you are
dealing with a fixed range of years, you can use a dropdown list for
that as well, eliminating having to deal with any text from the user
at all.

If the spec calls for plain text entry and you've already tried to get
that changed to something sane, my apologies.

     <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.