dateformat 0.9.0

Parse and format dates quickly

# dateformat
A simple, fast date parsing/formatting library for python

> But why another date library?

dateformat is designed to satisfy a specific set of requirements that no other library quite provides:

* Be fast (see below for benchmarks)
* Handle a variety of date formats from multiple sources
* Parse and format dates in many timezones and with many timezone offsets
* Represent the format in a way that a non-technical person may understand
* Be explicit about the expected format to prevent heuristic errors


## dateformat ⇄ datetime (builtin python module)

Dateformat is *not* trying to be a replacement for the builtin datetime module. `datetime.datetime` objects are used as the input/output to the parsing and formatting methods.

It is designed as a replacement for the `datetime.datetime.strftime` and `datetime.datetime.strptime` methods, providing:

* better timezone handling
* a simpler/more common syntax for specifying the date formats
* faster parsing

## dateformat ⇄ dateutil.parser.parse()

`dateutil.parser.parse`'s intent is to turn a string in an unknown format into a date. It does that by using a variety of heuristics to try to figure out the format the date has been expressed in.

This approach is highly useful, and very flexible, but suffers from a couple of drawbacks that dateformat doesn't have:

* There is ambiguity about what date will be produced from a given string, there are situations where that risk cannot be accepted, and it's important for the system to only accept a certain date format
* Because of all the work that dateutil is doing to work out the format used, it's fairly slow, at just under 10x slower than `strptime`, this is very noticable over 10s - 100s thousands of dates.

## dateformat ⇄ arrow

arrow is the closest to the way dateformat works, the syntax for describing dates is very similar. Unfortunately, arrow constructs its parser every time a date is parsed, creating a significant overhead when parsing each date.

## dateformat ⇄ iso8601 / ciso8601

ciso8601 is _really_ fast. Unfortunately both these libraries only handle a single date format, so are not useful in this situation.

# Benchmarks

the `benchmark/` dir contains some simple scripts to show how the relative libraries perform at parsing and formatting dates.

Running on a 2016 macbook pro, on Python 3.6.3 gave the following results (best of 3 runs):


| Library | Time to parse 10,000 dates (ms) | Parse time relative to `strptime` (lower is better) | Time to format 10,000 dates (ms) | Format time relative to `strftime` (lower is better) |
|------------|----------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------|
| datetime | 118 | 1 x | 37.8 | 1 x |
| dateformat | 88.3 | 0.75 x | 92.9 | 2.5 x |
| arrow | 565 | 4.8 x | 124 | 3.3 x |
| dateutil | 815 | 6.9 x | _NA_ | |
| iso8601 | 125 | 1.06 x | _NA_ | |
| ciso8601 | 3.27 | 0.028 x | _NA_ | |
| dateparser | 455 | 3.89 x | _NA_ | |