Parsing the string to Dates in python

Question

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Parse date and format it using python?

I'm very new to Python. I have the following two strings :

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:07 GMT
2012-10-29 12:57:08

I wish there could be any date parsing lib available in python which does parse the above two strings to something like this:

2012-10-29 12:57:08

So that I can compare them. Note that the comparison should be able to produce the result like integer comparison. Like 1 is less than 2, so the same way 2012-10-29 12:57:08 is less than 2012-10-29 13:57:08

Are there any easy to do so in python?

Thanks in advance.

See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2265357/parse-date-and-format-it-using-python . That is a duplicate of this question, that in turn identifies multiple other duplicates — Ngure Nyaga, Oct 29 '12 at 17:59

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 29 '12 at 18:00

7

Use the dateutil module for general date parsing:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse('Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:07 GMT')
datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 29, 13, 7, 7, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> parse('2012-10-29 12:57:08')
datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 29, 12, 57, 8)

datetime.datetime objects can be compared in various ways.

If you know the exact format of each date string to be parsed, you can also do the parsing more explicitly using the datetime.datetime.strptime() method:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:07 GMT', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 29, 13, 7, 7)

Note however that that method ignores timezones!

answered Oct 29 '12 at 18:00

Martijn Pieters

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+1 That works. But how do I compare the two result in order to find which one is smaller or greater? – sriram Oct 30 '12 at 03:29
1

@GroovyUser: Like you would other values: `dt1 < dt2`, etc. Note that you may want to *remove* the timezone and/or cast everything to UTC first (`dt1.astimezone(datutil.tz.tzutc())` for datetime objects with a timezone, `dt2.replace(tzinfo=dateutil.tz.tzutc())` for those without, or use the `default` keyword to `parse` to give all parsed datetime objects a timezone even if the string is missing timezone info. Removing a timezone is done with `.replace(tzinfo=None)`). – Martijn Pieters Oct 30 '12 at 08:47

Brian Cain · Answer 2 · 2012-10-29T18:01:24.693

Yes, time.strptime can convert the text to date representations. From there you can use strftime to print it how you like.

>>> a = '2012-10-29 12:57:08'
>>> time.strptime(a, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=12, tm_min=57, tm_sec=8, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=303, tm_isdst=-1)
>>> b = 'Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:07 GMT'
>>> time.strptime(b, '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=13, tm_min=7, tm_sec=7, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=303, tm_isdst=0)

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 29 '12 at 17:59

1

The datetime module in python, with its strptime function (string parse), can do that.

For example, you can use the function like this:

somestring = '2004-03-13T03:00:00Z'
result = datetime.datetime.strptime(somestring, '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')

Docs here.

answered Oct 29 '12 at 17:59

heltonbiker

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Parsing the string to Dates in python

3 Answers3