Converting string into datetime

Use the third party dateutil library:

from dateutil import parser
parser.parse("Aug 28 1999 12:00AM")  # datetime.datetime(1999, 8, 28, 0, 0)

It can handle most date formats, including the one you need to parse. It's more convenient than strptime as it can guess the correct format most of the time.

It's very useful for writing tests, where readability is more important than performance.

You can install it with:

pip install python-dateutil

Check out strptime in the time module. It is the inverse of strftime.

$ python
>>> import time
>>> my_time = time.strptime('Jun 1 2005  1:33PM', '%b %d %Y %I:%M%p')
time.struct_time(tm_year=2005, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=1,
                 tm_hour=13, tm_min=33, tm_sec=0,
                 tm_wday=2, tm_yday=152, tm_isdst=-1)

timestamp = time.mktime(my_time)
# convert time object to datetime
from datetime import datetime
my_datetime = datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp)
# convert time object to date
from datetime import date
my_date = date.fromtimestamp(timestamp)

I have put together a project that can convert some really neat expressions. Check out timestring.

Here are some examples below:

>>> import timestring
>>> timestring.Date('monday, aug 15th 2015 at 8:40 pm')
<timestring.Date 2015-08-15 20:40:00 4491909392>
>>> timestring.Date('monday, aug 15th 2015 at 8:40 pm').date
datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 15, 20, 40)
>>> timestring.Range('next week')
<timestring.Range From 03/10/14 00:00:00 to 03/03/14 00:00:00 4496004880>
>>> (timestring.Range('next week').start.date, timestring.Range('next week').end.date)
(datetime.datetime(2014, 3, 10, 0, 0), datetime.datetime(2014, 3, 14, 0, 0))

Remember this and you didn't need to get confused in datetime conversion again.

String to datetime object = strptime

datetime object to other formats = strftime

Jun 1 2005 1:33PM

is equals to

%b %d %Y %I:%M%p

%b Month as locale’s abbreviated name(Jun)

%d Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number(1)

%Y Year with century as a decimal number(2015)

%I Hour (12-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number(01)

%M Minute as a zero-padded decimal number(33)

%p Locale’s equivalent of either AM or PM(PM)

so you need strptime i-e converting string to

>>> dates = []
>>> dates.append('Jun 1 2005  1:33PM')
>>> dates.append('Aug 28 1999 12:00AM')
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> for d in dates:
...     date = datetime.strptime(d, '%b %d %Y %I:%M%p')
...     print type(date)
...     print date
... 

Output

<type 'datetime.datetime'>
2005-06-01 13:33:00
<type 'datetime.datetime'>
1999-08-28 00:00:00

What if you have different format of dates you can use panda or dateutil.parse

>>> import dateutil
>>> dates = []
>>> dates.append('12 1 2017')
>>> dates.append('1 1 2017')
>>> dates.append('1 12 2017')
>>> dates.append('June 1 2017 1:30:00AM')
>>> [parser.parse(x) for x in dates]

OutPut

[datetime.datetime(2017, 12, 1, 0, 0), datetime.datetime(2017, 1, 1, 0, 0), datetime.datetime(2017, 1, 12, 0, 0), datetime.datetime(2017, 6, 1, 1, 30)]

In Python >= 3.7.0,

to convert YYYY-MM-DD string to datetime object, datetime.fromisoformat could be used.

>>> from datetime import datetime

>>> date_string = "2012-12-12 10:10:10"
>>> print (datetime.fromisoformat(date_string))
>>> 2012-12-12 10:10:10