Compatibility with (e.g.) dateutil

[bobf32]

Hi,

I was looking at the dateutil library and it got me wondering about how safe it would be to use it with whenever classes as opposed to vanilla datetimes.

For example, dateutil recurrence rules can be defined by taking datetime arguments. Would this work if passed Instant or ZonedDateTime instances instead? And if so would this be a good thing to do in practice?

I'm aware of the py_datetime() whenever method so I guess it may be safer to use this when calling any dateutil (or other non-whenever library) method that expects a datetime.

Just wondering what the best practice is here.

[ariebovenberg]

Hi @bobf32, thanks for posting.

I'd definitely recommend converting with py_datetime() first. I'm certain dateutil doesn't know about whenever classes. Although some situations might go well due to duck typing, there's no telling what dateutil does internally, like expecting a tzinfo or microseconds.

[bobf32]

Many thanks @ariebovenberg, sounds perfectly reasonable.