datetime iso8601 string input

I was a little surprised to recently discover
that datetime has no method to input a string
value. PEP 321 appears does not convey much
information, but a timbot post from a couple
years ago clarifies things:

http://tinyurl.com/epjqc

You can stop looking: datetime doesn't
support any kind of conversion from string.
The number of bottomless pits in any datetime
module is unbounded, and Guido declared this
particular pit out-of-bounds at the start so
that there was a fighting chance to get
*anything* done for 2.3.

I can understand why datetime can't handle
arbitrary string inputs, but why not just
simple iso8601 format -- i.e. the default
output format for datetime?

Given a datetime-generated string:

>>> now = str(datetime.datetime.now())
>>> print now
'2006-02-23 11:03:36.762172'

Why can't we have a function to accept it
as string input and return a datetime object?

datetime.parse_iso8601(now)

Jeff Bauer
Rubicon, Inc.

.

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