Best way to handle time from input

Question

I'm trying to get a date and a hour from the user.

date = raw_input("enter date (example: 25/12/1990) ")
hour = raw_input("enter hour (example: 20:00) ")

That is how I have done that, but I think this is not a good way to implement it.
After the input I would like to compare the inputted time to the current time, and to other times.
I have planned to use the time module of python.

What would you suggest?

Answer 1

The above gives you a date as a string. You'll need to convert that string into a datetime object, and handle any errors which arise. If you restrict your users to simple dates then you can do everything with the datetime module, like this:

>>> import datetime
>>> date = "15/03/2012"
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(date, "%d/%m/%Y")
datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 15, 0, 0)
>>> hour = "13:01"
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(hour, "%H:%M")
datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 13, 1)
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(date + " " + hour, "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M")
datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 15, 13, 1)

>>> date = "1/4/2012"
>>> hour = "3:01"
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime(date + " " + hour, "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M")
datetime.datetime(2012, 4, 1, 3, 1)

You can use other datetime module code to do things like get the current date and time, or to find difference between two dates or times.

Answer 2

One of the best solutions I've ever seen — dateutil package, they have parser module with parse() function, trying to extract date/time from strings. Look examples here.