Python3: Convert arbitrary date to day of the week

Question

I am trying to convert dates of the following format:

2007-10-18 11:31:46 -0400 (Thu, 18 Oct 2007)

or

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:31:49 -0400

to the day of the week. Even though the day is given in the above dates, but how can I extract the only day of the week from the above dates?

Check out [this post](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9847213/how-do-i-get-the-day-of-week-given-a-date-in-python) — Strictly No Lollygagging, Apr 29 '19 at 15:55
You can just make a `list` or `dict` with the 7 days of the week and check if one of them is present as text. Or is the day of the week not always present as text? — 3UqU57GnaX, Apr 29 '19 at 15:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 29 '19 at 16:01

Is this too simple:

days = {
    'mon': 'Monday',
    'thu': 'Thursday',
    # and the others
}

haystack = '2007-10-18 11:31:46 -0400 (Thu, 18 Oct 2007)'
for acronym, full_name in days.items():
    if acronym in haystack.lower():
        print(f"Found {full_name}")

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 29 '19 at 16:01

0

days = ["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat", "Sun"]
date = "2007-10-18 11:31:46 -0400 (Thu, 18 Oct 2007)"
for d in days:
    if d in date:
         print(d)

answered Apr 29 '19 at 16:01

Adarsh Chavakula

1,509
19
28

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 29 '19 at 16:01

You can use dateutil.parser to get a datetime object from a string:

from dateutil import parser
dt = parser.parse("2007-10-18 11:31:46 -0400")
# dt = datetime.datetime(2007, 10, 18, 11, 31, 46, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -14400))

Then just use datetime.weekday. This will give you a number from 0 to 6, where 0 is the first day of the week relatively to your timezone, Monday by default.

dt.weekday
# 3, starting from 0 so it's Thursday

Python3: Convert arbitrary date to day of the week

3 Answers3