Question

Consider this code:

datestring = date.min.strftime("%d-%m-%Y")
date = datetime.strptime(datestring,"%d-%m-%Y")

This raises the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "D:/Dev/foo.py", line 37, in <module>
    datestring = date.min.strftime("%d-%m-%Y") ValueError: year=1 is before 1900; the datetime strftime() methods require year >= 1900

Why is the min date not 1900 then???

I’m using storing date.min in the init of a class as to set it to an empty date sortof. When I persist this to the sqlite database, I do not have a Null date this way.

I do this because when I read back an empty date from the db, it raises an error in dbapi2.py in the convertdate function

How do you guys solve this?

Answer 1

this is not the problem with date.min or datetime module, problem is due to platform-specific weirdnesses in implementations of strftime

see http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412

A work around would be to set a date_min > 1900 or just use a hand crafted string for your default date value