python-dateutil suggestiopn

[Skip Montanaro]

It doesn't look like Gustavo Niemeyer is actively working on
python-dateutil. Tomi Pievilaeinen is listed on PyPI as the author, but I
have no email address for him, so I'm tossing this message in a bottle out
into the Gulf Stream in hopes that Gustavo or Tomi notice it.

I'm using imaplib to download and process messages from Gmail. I use
dateutil.parser.parse to parse the Date header into a datetime object, then
use the most recent date I've seen to decide where to start up on the next
run.

Every once in awhile, I encountered a Date header I couldn't parse. The
couple I've seen so far have the same problem: two different spellings of
the timezone offset.

    Sat, 23 Aug 2014 16:42:08 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
    Fri, 22 Aug 2014 18:14:46 -0700 (GMT-07:00)

Discarding the extra timezone info in the "(GMT-07:00)" suffix makes the
string parseable:

>>> dateutil.parser.parse('Sat, 23 Aug 2014 16:42:08 -0700 (GMT-07:00)')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/skip/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dateutil/parser.py",
line 748, in parse
    return DEFAULTPARSER.parse(timestr, **kwargs)
  File "/Users/skip/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dateutil/parser.py",
line 310, in parse
    res, skipped_tokens = self._parse(timestr, **kwargs)
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable
>>> dateutil.parser.parse('Sat, 23 Aug 2014 16:42:08 -0700')
datetime.datetime(2014, 8, 23, 16, 42, 8, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -25200))

I suppose I could work around the problem, but it occurs so rarely, it's
just easier to discard that particular date. This would seem to be low
priority for Tomi and Gustavo, but thought that if it was an easy change it
might be worthwhile.

Skip
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