If you are dealing with dates & times in python and/or javascript, there are two must have libraries.

1. Datejs
2. python-dateutil

Datejs

Datejs, being javascript, is designed for parsing and creating human readable dates & times. It’s powerful parse() function can handle all the dates & times you’d expect, plus fuzzier human readable date words. Here are some examples from their site.

Date.parse("February 20th 1973");
Date.parse("Thu, 1 July 2004 22:30:00");
Date.parse("today");
Date.parse("next thursday");

And if you are programmatically creating Date objects, here’s a few functions I find myself using frequently.

// get a new Date object set to local date
var dt = Date.today();
// get that same Date object set to current time
var dt = Date.today().setTimeToNow();

// set the local time to 10:30 AM
var dt = Date.today().set({hour: 10, minute: 30});
// produce an ISO formatted datetime string converted to UTC
dt.toISOString();

There’s plenty more in the documentation; pretty much everything you need for manipulation, comparison, and string conversion. Datejs cleanly extends the default Date object, has been integrated into a couple date pickers, and supports culture specific parsing for i18n.

python-dateutil

Like Datejs, dateutil also has a powerful parse() function. While it can’t handle words like “today” or “tomorrow”, it can handle nearly every (American) date format that exists. Here’s a few examples.

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse("Thu, 4/2/09 09:00 PM")
datetime.datetime(2009, 4, 2, 21, 0)
>>> parser.parse("04/02/09 9:00PM")
datetime.datetime(2009, 4, 2, 21, 0)
>>> parser.parse("04-02-08 9pm")
datetime.datetime(2009, 4, 2, 21, 0)

An option that comes especially in handy is to pass in fuzzy=True. This tells parse() to ignore unknown tokens while parsing. This next example would raise a ValueError without fuzzy=True.

>>> parser.parse("Thurs, 4/2/09 09:00 PM", fuzzy=True)

It don’t know how well it works for international date formats, but parse() does have options for reading days first and years first, so I’m guessing it can be made to work.

dateutil also provides some great timezone support. I’ve always been surprised at python’s lack of concrete tzinfo classes, but dateutil.tz more than makes up for it (there’s also pytz, but I haven’t figured out why I need it instead of or in addition to dateutil.tz). Here’s a function for parsing a string and returning a UTC datetime object.

from dateutil import parser, tz
def parse_to_utc(s):
    dt = parser.parse(s, fuzzy=True)
    dt = dt.replace(tzinfo=tz.tzlocal())
    return dt.astimezone(tz.tzutc())

dateutil does a lot more than provide tzinfo objects and parse datetimes; it can also calculate relative deltas and handle iCal recurrence rules. I’m sure a whole calendar application could be built based on dateutil, but my interest is in parsing and converting datetimes to and from UTC, and in that respect dateutil excels.