Parse a string with a date to a datetime object [duplicate]

Question

How can I parse a string like "01-Jan-1995" to a Python datetime object?

EricP · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-31 19:21:15Z

24

On the whole you'd parse date and time strings with the strptime functions in time or datetime modules. Your example could be parsed with:

import datetime
datetime.datetime.strptime("01-Jan-1995", "%d-%b-%Y")

Note that parsing month names is locale-dependent. This table shows the directives for parsing various formats of dates and times.

EricP

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answered Nov 11, 2009 at 7:31

Tuure Laurinolli

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Comments

Soviut · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-07 12:28:11Z

10

dateutil can parse this sort of format without you even having to define custom date formats. Just install it with:

pip install python-dateutil

Then use it:

import dateutil.parser
dateutil.parser.parse('01-Jan-1995').date()

answered Nov 11, 2009 at 7:29

Soviut

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+1 for python-dateutil. It can even parse datestrings without you having to tell it the format.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:46:08Z

1

If you need to parse natural language date and time strings, consider parsedatetime (and this answer).

CommunityBot

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answered Jan 6, 2010 at 12:44

Adam Matan

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