dately 1.1.0

A library for manipulating datetime strings.

Dately Library: Comprehensive Date and Time Handling in Python

The dately module is a comprehensive library designed for advanced date and time manipulation. It offers extensive capabilities to handle various date and time formats, ensuring compatibility across different systems and data structures. The module provides tools for validating, extracting, and transforming date and time information with a focus on performance and accuracy.

This module, currently available only for the Windows operating system, provides comprehensive functionalities for date parsing, detection, extraction, and conversion. It efficiently handles both individual dates and large arrays of dates, offering robust support for various input types, including date strings, datetime objects, pandas Series, and NumPy arrays. The core functionalities include converting dates to specified formats or datetime objects, as well as parsing, detecting, and extracting date components. Leveraging regular expressions and NumPy, it processes dates with high speed and accuracy, ensuring consistent date handling, specifically optimized for Windows environments.

A key aspect of this module is addressing inconsistencies in Python's date formatting on the Windows operating system. The module specifically targets the handling of the hyphen-minus (-) in date format specifiers. This flag, used to remove leading zeros from formatted output (e.g., turning '01' into '1' for January), works reliably on Unix-like systems but does not function as intended on Windows. This discrepancy arises from the differing implementations of the underlying C libraries that Python relies on. For example, using a date format like '%Y-%-m-%d' on Windows results in Python not recognizing the specifier, leading to unexpected behaviors.

On Windows, where the feature to omit leading zeros using %-m in the strftime() and strptime() functions is unsupported, attempts to use such formats with inputs like '2024-3-01' can lead to misinterpretations, defaulting to '%Y-%m-%d', which retains the leading zero.

To solve this problem on Windows, the dately module introduces a workaround using regular expressions. It utilizes a detection function to determine the format string and then examines each date component for leading zeros through an extract_date_component function and a subsequent has_leading_zero check. Depending on the presence of leading zeros, the module adjusts the format string—replacing %m with %-m where applicable—to emulate the behavior expected from the hyphen-minus on Unix-like systems.

This method ensures that users on Windows achieve consistent date formatting, effectively compensating for the lack of native support for the hyphen-minus in date specifiers on this system.

Additionally, dately leverages both high-level Python and low-level C code (via Cython) to achieve efficient and high-performance operations.

Overall, dately is a powerful utility for anyone needing precise and flexible date and time handling in their applications, making it easier to manage, format, and validate date and time data consistently and efficiently.

Key Features

1. Date and Time Format Detection:

   • Automatically detect various date and time formats from strings, ensuring seamless parsing and conversion.
   • Supports a wide range of date formats, including standard and unique custom formats.

2. Timezone Management:

   • Fetches users current timezone information on import.

3. String Manipulation and Validation:

   • Extract specific components (year, month, day, hour, minute, second, timezone) from datetime strings.
   • Validate and replace parts of datetime strings to ensure accuracy and consistency.
   • Strip time and timezone information from datetime strings when needed.

4. Performance Optimizations:

   • Utilizes Cython to enhance performance for computationally intensive tasks.
   • Interfaces with underlying C code to perform high-speed string operations and date validations.