Accept ISO 8601 string, in addition to datetime/date/time object

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by locating the public humanize functions that accept datetime, date, or time values, including humanize_naturaldate, and review their current input handling. Check how existing tests cover these entry points. Done means supported ISO 8601 strings are accepted consistently while existing object inputs and invalid values retain defined behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Motivation:

I believe that the humanize functions are often used indrectly from template engines. In my case I use Jinja2 templating engine and the jinja2_humanize_extension, which relies on the humanize package.

{{ value | humanize_naturaldate }}

In many cases the underlying data (either a database, json-file or csv-file) stores/returns the datetime (or date or time) as a string, formatted in ISO8601 format. But in order to make humanize_naturaldate accept this, I need to first parse it.

{{ value | fromisoformat | humanize_naturaldate }}

The fromisoformat then needs to be set as a filter in the local or global jinja environment.

It would be great if humanize accepted these ISO8661 strings itself.

How to implement:

As far as I can tell, it would be very simple to implement and very simple to maintain. Every function callable by the client, that takes a datetime should start with:

if type(value) == str:
    try:
        value = datetime.datetime.fromisoformat(value)
    else:
        value = str

Similarly for date and time objects.

I will admit that I have only studied the code cursorily, and I might have missed some reasons why this is more complex than I currently believe it is.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
757
Forks
148
Avg merge
6d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
12

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