SQLite date fields

[CM]

> However, when it comes to writing-back data to the table, SQLite is very
> forgiving and is quite happy to store '25/06/2003' in a date field, but
> this is not ideal because a) I could be left with a mixture of date
> formats in the same column,  b) SQLite's date functions only work with
> ISO format.
> Therefore I need to convert the date string back to ISO format before
> committing, but then I would need a generic function which checks data
> about to be written in all date fields and converts to ISO if
> necessary.  That sounds a bit tedious to me, but maybe it is inevitable.

It doesn't strike me as particularly tedious if it is just the line:
datetime.datetime.strptime(mydate,'%Y-%m-%d').strftime('%d/%m/%Y')

> Are there simpler solutions?  Would it be easier to change the date
> field to a 10-character field and store 'dd/mm/yyyy' throughout the
> table?  This way no conversion is required when reading or writing from
> the table, and I could use datetime() functions if I needed to perform
> any date-arithmetic.

Maybe I've misunderstood, but wouldn't you have to do the conversion
to
display the date anyway?  It seems to me like, whichever approach you
take, you will have to do a conversion.  For that reason, isn't it
better to leave the date fields in ISO so that you can take advantage
of SQLite's date functions?

Che

>
> How have other developers overcome this problem?  Any help would be
> appreciated.  For the record, I am using SQLite3 with Python 3.1.
>
> Alan