Issue reading date formats about sciris HOT 5 CLOSED

Hey Hello there,
I am new to opensource but not to python, however, i might be wrong but here's why the above issue might have occured:

The source code related to the readdate is located in this file: sciris/sciris/sc_utils.py.
In line 1237 readdate function is defined, its implementation is such that it uses datetime module and looks for a format in the below dictinary called formats_to_try :

formats_to_try = {
    'date':           '%Y-%m-%d', # 2020-03-21
    'date-alpha':     '%Y-%b-%d', # 2020-Mar-21
    'date-numeric':   '%Y%m%d',   # 20200321
    'datetime':       '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S',    # 2020-03-21 14:35:21
    'datetime-alpha': '%Y-%b-%d %H:%M:%S',    # 2020-Mar-21 14:35:21
    'default':        '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f', # 2020-03-21 14:35:21.23483
    'ctime':          '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y', # Sat Mar 21 23:09:29 2020
    }

In our issue case, we are supplying the '%T' for '15:48:05' but the code is unable to find it.

Fixing Issue: What we can do is instead of using '%T' we can use '%H:%M:%S' as:

sc.readdate("Tue 2020-09-29 15:48:05", dateformat='%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

which is available in the formats_to_try dictionary.

I hope this helps and if not please do let me know 😄.
And sorry for bad editing

from sciris.

Hi @appsplash99 , thank you so much for your comment! This indeed does fix it. %T is a valid time code in some cases (here, git log) but not for Python. But the real issue is that the way readdate() is written, it doesn't pass on exceptions. In this case the exception strptime() raises is quite clear, ValueError: 'T' is a bad directive in format '%a %Y-%m-%d %T'. This issue will be fixed in the next release of Sciris, hopefully in a few weeks.

from sciris.

Can i do it?

from sciris.

Sure, go ahead! Thank you!

from sciris.

Wait! I don't think there's any error here:
I think our application of using%T is inapplicable.

The reason why:
Even if i use %T with datetime as it is , we still get an error:

INPUT:
datetime_str = '09/19/18 10:55:26'
datetime_object = datetime.strptime(datetime_str, '%m/%d/%y %T')
print(datetime_object) 

OUTPUT:
ValueError: 'T' is a bad directive in format '%m/%d/%y %T'

So, you can use%X instead which is Locale’s appropriate time representation. - 21:30:00 (en_US); 21:30:00 (de_DE)

Another Fix:

sc.readdate("Tue 2020-09-29 15:48:05", dateformat='%a %Y-%m-%d %X')

Hope this Helps 😄 👍

from sciris.