Date and time fields should accept multiple formats

[Adrian Holovaty]

Date and time fields should be able to adapt to multiple formats of user input (a la Simon's ​date parser).

As a basic example, a user should be able to enter "Today" or "Wednesday" for the date and have it converted to the correct format for today's date or this Wednesday's.

For time fields, a user should be able to enter 6pm instead of 18:00.

[Jason Huggins]

Getting this right and bug free in all the corner cases is *hard work*. I just modifed one of my apps (non-Django) to remove choice in date formats and standardized on one format because having so much choice was the route of a lot of bugs. I suggest this doesn't belong on the version 1.0 milestone. The current defaults of ISO date format (YYYY-MM-DD) and 24-hour time are fine for a 1.0 release-- these are sane defaults that people should be able to put up with / live with until a post 1.0 release. But that's just my opinion. :-)

[Jason Huggins]

darn those homonyms...

1) "route to a lot of bugs..."
or
2) "root cause of a lot of bugs..."

Take your pick as to which one I meant. :-)

[Lawrence Oluyede]

What about using dateutil's parse method? Seems to work really well:

from dateutil.parser import parse
parse("Tuesday")

datetime.datetime(2006, 12, 26, 0, 0)

for example...

See: ​http://labix.org/python-dateutil#head-c0e81a473b647dfa787dc11e8c69557ec2c3ecd2

[Adrian Holovaty]

See #3113 for some discussion of parsing dates.

[(none)]

Milestone Version 1.0 deleted

[Gary Wilson <gary.wilson@…>]

I would say that #3113 supersedes the dates part of this ticket, and newforms allows for date entry in various (non-humanized) formats. Leaving open to decide about the humanizing of times.

[Jacob]

This has been fixed in newforms.