Checklist for making python 2.7 scripts run in python 2.4

py27topy24.py

'''I recently had to deploy a test script I had written in python 2.7 to a server where only python 2.4 was allowed. In the process of making my code backwards compatible, I made a brief checklist of things to watch out for:
* any and all functions can still be used but you have to manually code them
* with-as blocks must be replaced with try-finally
* try-except-finally must be converted to try-except-else
* string formatting: "".format() must be replaced with "%s"%(args) approach.
* Replace all instances of "except Exception as err:" with "except Exception, e:"
* may need to manually convert some unicode strings into str, especially when loading json
* Some modules have different names, eg: "email.MIMEText" versus "email.mime.text.MIMEText"
* The datetime module does not have strptime() in 2.4. However, you can import it with a different name and then make a subclass with the desired behavior by calling strptime() from the time module instead:'''

from datetime import datetime as datetime_base
if not hasattr(datetime_base,'strptime'):
    import time
    class datetime(datetime_base):
        @classmethod
        def strptime(self,date_string,format):
            return datetime_base(*(time.strptime(date_string, format)[0:6]))
else: datetime = datetime_base