Why does Python store German and Spanish (and other?) time format strings as %T in the locale module?

Question

I'm writing a test for a program that will be used in multiple locales. While running the test in German, i got the error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 454, in _strptime_time
    return _strptime(data_string, format)[0]
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 317, in _strptime
    (bad_directive, format))
ValueError: 'T' is a bad directive in format '%T'

Digging into this, i discovered that using locale.nl_langinfo(locale.T_FMT) while in German or Spanish (and potentially other languages) produces the format string '%T'. This is not recognized in the time module.

The documentation on locale at python.org doesn't mention anything about returning '%T'. The only reference to '%T' i could find anywhere is in a response to a separate StackOverflow question. From that post and context, i'm assuming '%T' is shorthand for '%H:%M:%S'.

My question is, how do i handle the locales for which locale will return '%T' for its format string without doing something like

if fmt_str == '%T':
    fmt_str = '%H:%M:%S'

to handle those cases?

Answer 1

This is a wholly unsatisfying answer, but this is the answer anyway:

The reason locale and time.strptime do not play well together is because the locale formats were not written for time.strptime. They were written for time.strftime, to produce necessary date/time formats, not to parse them.

Because time.strptime was written to be platform independent, it does not accept as many directives as locale gives out; time.strftime needs to be able to convert anything thrown at it, so it accepts any platform-defined directive.

So, no, there is no easier way to make time and locale cooperate the way I want them to.