Is there a standalone Python type conversion library?

Question

Are there any standalone type conversion libraries?

I have a data storage system that only understands bytes/strings, but I can tag metadata such as the type to be conve

Answer 1

Consider this.

import datetime

def toDate( someString ):
    return datetime.datetime.strptime( someString, "%x" ).date()

typeConversionMapping = { 'integer': int, 'string': str, 'float': float, 'date': toDate }
def typeConversionFunction( typeConversionTuple ):
    theStringRepresentation, theTypeName = typeConversionTuple
    return typeConversionMapping[theTypeName](theStringRepresentation)

Is that a good enough standalone library for such a common activity? Would that be enough of a well-tested, error-resilient library? Or is there something more that's required?

If you need more or different date/time conversions, you simply add new toDate functions with different formats.