Handling international dates in python

Question

I have a date that is either formatted in German for e.g,

2. Okt. 2009

and also perhaps as

2. Oct. 2009

Answer 1

http://docs.python.org/library/locale.html

The datetime module is already locale aware.

It's something like the following

# German locale
loc= locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME,("de","de"))
try:
     date= datetime.date.strptime( input, "%d. %b. %Y" )
except:
     # English locale
     loc= locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME,("en","us"))
     date= datetime.date.strptime( input, "%d. %b. %Y" )