i have reservations about dateutil. it's certainly true that the built-in time and date routines in python are ugly, but dateutil's parsing doesn't try to give

i have reservations about dateutil. it's certainly true that the built-in time and date routines in python are ugly, but dateutil's parsing doesn't try to give a single, consistent interpretation of an input date/time - instead it parses it in chunks, where one chunk can effectively overwrite another. so you can have input that is illogical or inconsistent and dateutil will happily give a single "right" answer instead of flagging an error. for example, see this bug on so - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10575919/strange-date-parsing-results-in-python http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10575919/strange-date-par... in short: it's ok for non-critical cases where you just need "some date" from input. but don't use it if you would rather have an error than an incorrect interpretation.