mendhak
commented
1 year ago Well I started playing around with this, and I'm so glad you asked this because I had a ton of fun trying things out. I thought it would be simple, but ended up in an unexpected place. tl;dr: It's possible but fonts are a problem.
It seems there's a way in Python to tell it to pick up the system's locale settings which includes the date and time formatting.
$ LC_TIME=ko_KR.utf8 python3
>>> import locale, datetime
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
'LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_TIME=ko_KR.utf8;LC_COLLATE=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_NAME=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_ADDRESS=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_TELEPHONE=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_GB.UTF-8'
>>> datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%X')
'18시 30분 09초'So the first problem is the seconds, because the 'time' string isn't the same across cultures it isn't as easy as cutting off the last part. It's not end of the world though, there's a library called Babel which can help. It has a format=short which just does hour and minutes. In some cases it was just the hour and minute, and in some cases it includes a suffix like 'pm' or 'PM' or 'μ.μ.' or 'م'
LC_TIME=el_GR.utf8 python3
Python 3.10.6 (main, Nov 14 2022, 16:10:14) [GCC 11.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> from babel.dates import format_time
>>> format_time(datetime.now(), format='short')
'6:56 μ.μ.'This is where I ran into an issue, the font!
When I try zh_TW, and I'd imagine for some other locales, the font I've chosen in the SVG doesn't have the right symbols.
This was zh_TW
This was ko_KR
The left side time is from the Babel library and the right side date is the normal Python formatting.
Similar issues with Korean, though in fairness most European languages didn't have a problem.
OK some thoughts. So one option is (what's explored above) is just completely respecting what the OS says and letting Python pick it up and display it however it should - that includes whether to show 12 or 24 hour format. And the main task then is to figure out if the missing character problem, can a different font be picked somehow, or does the system tell you what its "default" font is.
Another option is to completely ignore all of that, don't respect anything, just have an option for 12 or 24 hour time.
Of course I really like the first option, because it's not just about 24 hour format but localization. Wouldn't it be nice if this weren't English centric! And I bet that the calendar entries could be localized too, with a bit of help from the humanize package.
If you've read this far let me know your thoughts on it. I will be playing around with font/display options next week anyway and see if there's a simple solution.
hnnweb
How much work would it be to display the 24 hour timeformat? The most correct way would be to rely on the LC_TIME format.