[issue15873] datetime: add ability to parse RFC 3339 dates and times

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle <p.ganssle at gmail.com> added the comment:

> The better is the enemy of the good here.  Given the history of this issue, I would rather accept a well documented restrictive parser than wait for a more general code to be written.  Note that we can always relax the parsing rules in the future.

This is in fact the exact reason why I wrote the isoformat parser like I did, because ISO 8601 is actually a quite expansive standard, and this is the least controversial subset of the features. In fact, I spent quite a bit of time on adapting the general purpose ISO8601 parser I wrote for dateutil *into* one that only accepts the output of isoformat() because it places a minimum burden on ongoing support, so it's not really a matter of waiting for a more general parser to be written.

I suggest that for Python 3.7 we *only* support output of isoformat(). Many general iso8601 parsers exist, including the one I have already implemented for python-dateutil (which will be part of the dateutil 2.7.0 release). We can have further discussion later about what exactly should be supported in Python 3.8, but even in the pre-release discussions I'm already seeing pushback about some of the more unusual 8601 formats, and it's a *lot* easier to explain (in documentation) that `fromisoformat()` is intended to be the inverse of `isoformat()` than it is to explain which variations of ISO 8601 are and are not supported (fractional minutes? if you're following the standard, the separator has to be a T, so what other variations of the standard are allowed?).

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue15873>
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