Thread-safe equivalent to python's time.strptime()?

Question

Something I wrote throws a lot of AttributeError exceptions when using time.strptime() inside a thread. This only seems to happen on Windows (not on Linux) but whatever- upon a'Googling, it seems that time.strptime() isn't considered thread-safe.

Is there a better way to create a datetime object from a string? Current code looks like:

val = DateFromTicks(mktime(strptime(val, '%B %d, %Y')))

But, that yields the exceptions as it's run inside a thread.

Thanks!

Answer 1

According to the bug report, this doesn't happen if you call strptime once before creating your threads. I've done a little testing which seems to confirm this. So just make any call to strptime during initialization as a workaround.

Answer 2

Just another workaround for this bug, you can simply import _strptime manually, along with datetime

import _strptime
from datetime import datetime

# then, in threaded block
datetime.strptime(date, format)

Answer 3

Have you tried manually synchronizing it yourself? Possibly using the synchronization decorator from this recipe.

Answer 4

When I use import datetime the datetime.datetime.strptime() does not throw the exception anymore.