strptime - dates formatted differently on different computers

[Michael Torrie]

On 12/10/2012 02:18 PM, noydb wrote:
> Follow-on question to this earlier topic - https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.python/wnUlPBBNah8/discussion 
> 
> Was curious to know if there was a way to handle different user computers with different operating system set date formats.  2/10/2006 vs 2-10-2006, for example.  Not an issue for my current task, but was just curious how this could be handled?
> 
> If in my code I am declaring the user entered date foramtted as
> x = datetime.datetime.strptime(user_entered_time , "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p") # format for my computer
> 
> but on another person's computer, their's is set as 2-10-2006 14:26:06, the code fails.  Can this be accounted for?

I use a module I got from pypi called dateutil.  It has a nice submodule
called parser that can handle a variety of date formats with good
accuracy.  Not sure how it works, but it handles all the common American
date formats I've thrown at it.