strftime return value encoding (mbcs, locale, etc.)

[Mark Tolonen]

"Giovanni Bajo" <rasky at develer.com> wrote in message 
news:%D5nj.2630$Xg7.935 at tornado.fastwebnet.it...
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to find a good way to portably get the output of strftime()
> and put it onto a dialog (I'm using PyQt, but it doesn't really matter).
> The problem is that I need to decode the byte stream returned by strftime
> () into Unicode.
>
> This old bug:
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2003-
> November/020983.html
>
> (last comment) mentions that it is "byte string in the locale's encoding".
>
> The comment also suggests to use "mbcs" in Windows (which, AFAIK, it's
> sort of an "alias" encoding for the current Windows codepage), and to
> find out the exact encoding using locale.getpreferredencoding().
>
> Thus, I was hoping that something like:
>
>  strftime("%#c", localtime()).decode(locale.getpreferredencoding())
>
> would work... but alas I was reported this exception:
>
>  LookupError: unknown encoding: cp932
>
> So: what is the correct code to achieve this? Will something like this
> work:
>
>  data = strftime("%#c", localtime())
>  if os.name == "nt":
>     data = data.decode("mbcs")
>  else:
>     data = dada.decode(locale.getpreferredencoding())
>
> Is this the correct way of doing it? (Yes, it sucks).
>
> Shouldn't Python automatically alias whatever is returned by
> locale.getpreferredencoding() to "mbcs", so that my original code works
> portably?
>
> Thanks in advance!
> -- 
> Giovanni Bajo

Odd, what version of Python are you using?  Python 2.5 works:

>>> import time,locale
>>> time.strftime('%#c').decode(locale.getpreferredencoding()) # cp1252 on 
>>> my system
u'Sunday, January 27, 2008 12:56:30'
>>> time.strftime('%#c').decode('cp932')
u'Sunday, January 27, 2008 12:56:40'
>>> time.strftime('%#c').decode('mbcs')
u'Sunday, January 27, 2008 12:56:48'

--Mark