Subsections

17 New, Improved, and Deprecated Modules

As usual, Python's standard library received a number of enhancements and bug fixes. Here's a partial list of the most notable changes, sorted alphabetically by module name. Consult the Misc/NEWS file in the source tree for a more complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details.

17.1 Date/Time Type

Date and time types suitable for expressing timestamps were added as the datetime module. The types don't support different calendars or many fancy features, and just stick to the basics of representing time.

The three primary types are: date, representing a day, month, and year; time, consisting of hour, minute, and second; and datetime, which contains all the attributes of both date and time. There's also a timedelta class representing differences between two points in time, and time zone logic is implemented by classes inheriting from the abstract tzinfo class.

You can create instances of date and time by either supplying keyword arguments to the appropriate constructor, e.g. datetime.date(year=1972, month=10, day=15), or by using one of a number of class methods. For example, the date.today() class method returns the current local date.

Once created, instances of the date/time classes are all immutable. There are a number of methods for producing formatted strings from objects:

>>> import datetime
>>> now = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> now.isoformat()
'2002-12-30T21:27:03.994956'
>>> now.ctime()  # Only available on date, datetime
'Mon Dec 30 21:27:03 2002'
>>> now.strftime('%Y %d %b')
'2002 30 Dec'

The replace() method allows modifying one or more fields of a date or datetime instance, returning a new instance:

>>> d = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2002, 12, 30, 22, 15, 38, 827738)
>>> d.replace(year=2001, hour = 12)
datetime.datetime(2001, 12, 30, 12, 15, 38, 827738)
>>>

Instances can be compared, hashed, and converted to strings (the result is the same as that of isoformat()). date and datetime instances can be subtracted from each other, and added to timedelta instances. The largest missing feature is that there's no standard library support for parsing strings and getting back a date or datetime.

For more information, refer to the module's reference documentation. (Contributed by Tim Peters.)

17.2 The optparse Module

The getopt module provides simple parsing of command-line arguments. The new optparse module (originally named Optik) provides more elaborate command-line parsing that follows the Unix conventions, automatically creates the output for --help, and can perform different actions for different options.

You start by creating an instance of OptionParser and telling it what your program's options are.

import sys
from optparse import OptionParser

op = OptionParser()
op.add_option('-i', '--input',
              action='store', type='string', dest='input',
              help='set input filename')
op.add_option('-l', '--length',
              action='store', type='int', dest='length',
              help='set maximum length of output')

Parsing a command line is then done by calling the parse_args() method.

options, args = op.parse_args(sys.argv[1:])
print options
print args

This returns an object containing all of the option values, and a list of strings containing the remaining arguments.

Invoking the script with the various arguments now works as you'd expect it to. Note that the length argument is automatically converted to an integer.

$ ./python opt.py -i data arg1
<Values at 0x400cad4c: {'input': 'data', 'length': None}>
['arg1']
$ ./python opt.py --input=data --length=4
<Values at 0x400cad2c: {'input': 'data', 'length': 4}>
[]
$

The help message is automatically generated for you:

$ ./python opt.py --help
usage: opt.py [options]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -iINPUT, --input=INPUT
                        set input filename
  -lLENGTH, --length=LENGTH
                        set maximum length of output
$

See the module's documentation for more details.

Optik was written by Greg Ward, with suggestions from the readers of the Getopt SIG.

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