While skimming through the release notes for the upcoming Python 3.5 version I noticed a reference to a bug in the datetime module. Since I use that basically whenever I do anything in Python I got curious.
Turns out that up until 3.5 there was a datetime.time instance that got
evaluated to False in a boolean context (issue13936):
> bool(datetime.time(0, 0, 0))
False
So basically whenever you have a time instance, make sure to compare it against another one of None, but never do the implicit boolean check!
While this behaviour has been documented …
in Boolean contexts, a time object is considered to be true if and only if, after converting it to minutes and subtracting utcoffset() (or 0 if that’s None), the result is non-zero.
… that doesn’t change that it is highly un-intuitive. The reasons for this implementation have been laid out in the issue but I’m really glad that with 3.5 all time instance will evaluate to true!
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