Question

Has anyone managed to use locale on OS X to derive a default local date and time format ? (I need to parse simple dates and times in a variety of locales).

For the moment, I am resorting to osascript …

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

cmd = "osascript -e " + """'
    tell (current date)
        set {its year, its month, its day} to {2001, 2, 3}
        set {its hours, its minutes, its seconds} to {4, 5, 6}
        return its short date string & tab & its time string
    end tell'"""

str_date, err_num = Popen(cmd, shell=True, \
    stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE).communicate()

str_date, _, str_time = str_date.rpartition('   ')
str_date_pattern = str_date.replace('2001', '%Y').replace('02', '%m').replace('03','%d')
str_time_pattern = str_time.replace('04', '%H').replace('05', '%M').replace('06', '%S').rstrip()

which returns something like:

'%d/%m/%Y', '%H:%M:%S'

Answer 1

Why not use the python-dateutil package instead?

It’s parse function can handle most formats without having to configure the format:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse('03/02/2001 04:05:06')
datetime.datetime(2001, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6)

Alternatively, you could try and translate the ICU format strings available via the defaults read command:

$ defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleICUDateFormatStrings
{
    1 = "yyyy/M/d";
}
$ defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleICUTimeFormatStrings
{
    1 = "kk:mm ";
    2 = "kk:mm:ss ";
    3 = "kk:mm:ss  z";
    4 = "kk:mm:ss  v";
}

These are the locale settings configured via the Language & Text configuration panel.