Python RFC 3339 implementation

Implementation of the majority of http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt. Provides an implementation of tzinfo for UTC (why isn't this in the standard library?) as well as various parsing and formatting routines based on RFC 3339's syntax for dates and times.

Use datetime.datetime.isoformat() as an inverse of the various parsing routines in this module.

This library sticks quite closely to the RFC 3339 profile of ISO 8601. If that's too strict for you, and you need something for parsing more general ISO 8601 dates and times, you might find pyiso8601 (in debian as package python-iso8601) useful.

Examples and documentation

See the docstrings in the rfc3339 module source code itself.

Limitations and potential improvements

Limitations, with respect to RFC 3339:

• Section 4.3, "Unknown Local Offset Convention", is not implemented.

• Section 5.6, "Internet Date/Time Format", is the ONLY supported format implemented by the various parsers in this module. (Section 5.6 is reproduced in its entirety below.)

• Section 5.7, "Restrictions", is left to the datetime.datetime constructor to implement, with the exception of limits on timezone minutes-east-of-UTC magnitude. In particular, leap seconds are not addressed by this module. (And it appears that they are not supported by datetime, either.)

Potential Improvements:

• Support for leap seconds. (There's a table of them in RFC 3339 itself, and http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp50/leapsecond.cfm <!-- used to be http://tf.nist.gov/pubs/bulletin/leapsecond.htm --> is supposed to update monthly.)

Copyright

rfc3339.py -- Implementation of the majority of RFC 3339 for python.
Copyright (c) 2008, 2009, 2010 LShift Ltd. query@lshift.net

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