Thiiink: Ideas, Imagination, and Innovation in GIS

Recently we finished off a very aggressive sprint to release a new set of tools for one of our clients.  Much fun had and the delivery and roll-out went very smooth – great teamwork all around and excellent interaction with the client internal IT department.

One item that crept up late in the development cycle (not that we didn’t know about it, just that we hadn’t thought through the full set of implications) was localization.  This really hadn’t been an issue in previous releases but with adding new functionality and capability related to dates and times, well, of course it was now an issue.

The application needed to work regardless of the personal preferences each person had set for their date/time format. Hmmm, will that require a bunch of string manipulation and testing and checks, or maybe, just maybe the good folks behind the Python language have already crossed that bridge…and, of course, they had.

A word that comes up often when talking about Python and implementation is elegance, and this time was no exception.  Simple solution to what could have been a nightmare coding effort in the final days.  Hanging off of the datetime (and time) modules is strftime and one of its format strings does exactly what we needed, for example, the following interactive code shows how a datetime is return in my system (local) format – way cool!

>> import datetime
>> t = datetime.datetime.today()
>> print t
2009-03-26 08:25:29.160000
>> t.strftime(‘%x’)
‘03/26/09′

Where this really becomes a benefit is when working with an ESRI cursor object, and you’re wondering “How the heck should my date be specified so that it ends up in the database correctly?”, next time just wrap it with some %x and let the magic happen.