Question

Is there an easy way in python to transform a string representation of a date interval:

P1M

To a timestamp or a datetime object?

Basically I need to work with date intervals according to this ISO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Something similar to http://php.net/manual/en/class.dateinterval.php

Answer 1

There appears to be a third-party module called isodate that may do what you want:

In [1]: from isodate import parse_duration

In [2]: parse_duration('P1M')
Out[2]: isodate.duration.Duration(0, 0, 0, years=0, months=1)

You can also convert this object into a datetime.timedelta object if necessary (providing a start or end parameter so that the proper duration can be calculated in terms of the provided date):

In [8]: import datetime

In [9]: d = parse_duration('P1M')

In [10]: d.todatetime(start=datetime.datetime.today())
Out[10]: datetime.timedelta(31)