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pythondatedatetime-parsing
Crista23
Crista23

Reputation: 3243

Python parse datestring to date

I am trying to parse a datetime string to date in Python. The input value is of the form:

     "February 19, 1989"

I have been trying so far 

     datetime.datetime.strptime("February 19, 1989", "%B %d, %y")

but I am always getting error. What is the right way to parse such a date? Thank you!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 253

Answers (2)

Andy
Andy

Reputation: 50560

In addition to David's answer, if you have a list of strings that have a variety of formats (say, some have two digit years and others have four), you can utilize the dateutil package to help parse these strings into datetime objects automagically.

from dateutil import parser

dates = ["February 19, 1989", "February 19, 89", "February 19, 01"]
for d in dates:
    print(parser.parse(d))

Prints three date time objects:

datetime.datetime(1989, 2, 19, 0, 0)
datetime.datetime(1989, 2, 19, 0, 0)
datetime.datetime(2001, 2, 19, 0, 0)

The downside to this, compared to the previously mentioned answer, is that it requires an extra package. The upside is that it is fairly good at determining your date without your needing to know the format string.

Upvotes: 1

David Gomes
David Gomes

Reputation: 5825

The following works (changed small case y to uppercase Y):

datetime.datetime.strptime("February 19, 1989", "%B %d, %Y")

The reason is that %y is for 99, 98 and such, while %Y is for full year. You can read the full documentation on this here.

Upvotes: 3

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