strptime and date format strings

[Roy Katz]

Hi!


I was wondering if anyone had a solution for detecting a date format
reported by an HTTP header and converting it to a standard time float? 

I believe I may have seen this once; when I write a program that retrieves
the last-modified header from URLs, not all servers report the date in the
same format.  Why hasn't this been ackowledged in urllib's design? 

I believe that one must detect the date format somehow and then supply 
the correct format to strptime().  Alas, if there were only such a 
one-size-fits-all function which would just take a string and give you
back the time. 



Roey Katz

president
Programmers with Heart Attacks