I have some strings which come to me in formats like
29-Jul-2014 or 03-Aug-2015
What is the easiest way to convert this to a datetime.date object?
I can only think to make a dictionary like d = {'Jul': 7, 'Aug': 8, ...} and then do
dt = datetime.date(year, d[month], day)
Is there any other easier way and avoid the creation of this dictionary?
Thanks
Use datetime.datetime.strptime to convert the string to datetime.datetime object.
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('29-Jul-2014', '%d-%b-%Y')
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 29, 0, 0)
Then, use datetime.datetime.date method to convert it to datetime.date object:
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('29-Jul-2014', '%d-%b-%Y').date()
datetime.date(2014, 7, 29)
The easy way is use dateutil.parse module, it lets to parse the common date formats, even if you don't know what it is using currently
Ex:
>>> import dateutil.parser
>>>
>>> utc_time = '2014-07-29T00:00:00'
>>> verbose_time = '29-Jul-2014'
>>> some_locale = '29/7/14'
>>> dateutil.parser.parse(utc_time)
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 29, 0, 0)
>>> dateutil.parser.parse(verbose_time)
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 29, 0, 0)
>>> dateutil.parser.parse(some_locale)
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 29, 0, 0)
Once you have a datetime object, you only should invoke the datetime.date() method
