i have reservations about dateutil. it's certainly true that the built-in time and date routines in python are ugly, but dateutil's parsing doesn't try to give a single, consistent interpretation of an input date/time - instead it parses it in chunks, where one chunk can effectively overwrite another. so you can have input that is illogical or inconsistent and dateutil will happily give a single "right" answer instead of flagging an error.
in short: it's ok for non-critical cases where you just need "some date" from input. but don't use it if you would rather have an error than an incorrect interpretation.
for example, see this bug on so - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10575919/strange-date-par...
in short: it's ok for non-critical cases where you just need "some date" from input. but don't use it if you would rather have an error than an incorrect interpretation.