not getting date time from correctly formatted string

Question

I'm using this code to get the time from lines in a file.

    for line in f:
        try:
            dt = parser.parse(line).replace(tzinfo=None)
            print dt
        except Exception, e:
            print line
            print(traceback.format_exc())
            continue


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./script.py", line 90, in read
    dt = parser.parse(line).replace(tzinfo=None)
AttributeError: 'ArgumentParser' object has no attribute 'parse'

try with `strip()`: `t = parser.parse(line.strip()).replace(tzinfo=None)` — Mazdak, May 15 '15 at 18:06
instead of just doing `continue` on an exception, how about printing out the traceback so you (and we) can know exactly what's wrong? it's debugging 101 — oxymor0n, May 15 '15 at 18:10
@Kasra no ... dateutil.parser does not care about extra whitespace — Joran Beasley, May 15 '15 at 18:10
unrelated: you could [use `email.utils.parsedate_tz` to parse such time strings](http://stackoverflow.com/a/23117071/4279) — jfs, May 16 '15 at 12:35

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 15 '15 at 18:10

the best thing you can do is learn to debug your issues with simple print statements

for line in f:
    try:
        dt = parser.parse(line).replace(tzinfo=None)\
        print "SUCCESS:",dt
    except Exception as e:
        traceback.print_exc()
        print "UNABLE TO PARSE: %r"%line
        continue

now you should quickly be able to find out what the problem is ... clearly the line does not look like your example

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 16 '15 at 12:33

Check where you assign parser name in your code.

Compare:

>>> from argparse import ArgumentParser
>>> parser = ArgumentParser()
>>> s = 'Fri May 15 11:22:54 EDT 2015'
>>> parser.parse(s)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'ArgumentParser' object has no attribute 'parse'

with:

>>> from dateutil import parser
>>> parser.parse(s)
datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 15, 11, 22, 54)

not getting date time from correctly formatted string

2 Answers2