Trying to parse a German date string fails in Python
2.4.1. Test case attached.

Since there's no indenting, I suppose the test case can
also be pasted here:

import locale, time
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'de_DE')
date = u'10. September 2005 um 17:26'
format = '%d. %B %Y um %H:%M'
time.strptime(date, format)

--
Adam Monsen
http://adammonsen.com/

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Here's a simpler, more precise test case (also attached):

import locale, time
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'de_DE')
date = u'September'; format = '%B'
time.strptime(date, format)

Here's the error I see:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "de_strptime_fail_simple.py", line 4, in ?
    time.strptime(date, format)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/_strptime.py", line 329, in strptime
    month = locale_time.f_month.index(found_dict['B'].lower())
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in
position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

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Can you let me know what time.strftime() outputs for your
test case, specifically what type of basestring (str or
unicode)?

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I get a str from time.strftime().

>>> import time
>>> time.strftime('%B')
'September'
>>> time.strftime('%B').__class__
<type 'str'>

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OK, then that settles it.  If time.strftime() ever returned
unicode, I would say this needs fixing.  But since
time.strptime() is meant to be the mirror opposite of
time.strftime(), I am going to close this as "Won't Fix". 
If time.strftime() ever gets changed to return unicode, then
I will fix it.

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Ok, sounds good.

For anyone trying to work around this, unicode date strings
should be encoded to simple Python strings (type of str)
before passing into strptime. Here's an updated version of
the aforementioned test case demonstrating an acceptable
workaround:

import locale, time
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, 'de_DE')
date = u'September'.encode()
format = '%B'
time.strptime(date, format)

--
Adam Monsen <adamm@wazamatta.com>
http://adammonsen.com/