String date to date object in python

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Parsing Dates and Times from Strings using python

I'm reading a string

"2011-06-11"

How can I cast this to a date object?

thanks

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2265357/parse-date-and-format-it-using-python — Eric Wilson, Oct 31 '11 at 20:41
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1713594/parsing-dates-and-times-from-strings-using-python — Eric Wilson, Oct 31 '11 at 20:41

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 31 '11 at 20:40

4

If you know it will be in that format, you can use the strptime function:

datetime.datetime.strptime(s, "%Y-%m-%d").date()

(and it's not a cast, you're actually creating a new date out of the string)

If you don't know the format of the date, I suggest looking at the dateutil module which provides a powerful date parsing function.

answered Oct 31 '11 at 20:40

David Z

1

I know, but it's a static method which doesn't take a class parameter, so it's called the same way as a non-member function. I thought it easier to just call it a function. (Plus technically there _is_ an actual Python function at work behind the scenes.) – David Z Oct 31 '11 at 20:53

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 31 '11 at 20:40

In [105]: import datetime as dt

This parses the string and returns a dt.datetime object:

In [106]: dt.datetime.strptime('2011-06-11',"%Y-%m-%d")
Out[106]: datetime.datetime(2011, 6, 11, 0, 0)

This returns a dt.date object:

In [108]: dt.datetime.strptime('2011-06-11',"%Y-%m-%d").date()
Out[108]: datetime.date(2011, 6, 11)

The strptime method is documented here, and the format string "%Y-%m-%d" is explained here.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 31 '11 at 20:41

0

Do this:

import datetime

date = datetime.datetime.strptime('2011-06-11', '%Y-%m-%d')

answered Oct 31 '11 at 20:41

César

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

0

datetime.datetime.strptime("2011-06-11", "%Y-%m-%d")

edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

Community

answered Oct 31 '11 at 20:42

wmil

4 Answers4