I have a pipe delimited text file with records like:
ABC|1234|10/26/2016|PQRS|02/27/2016|
GHI|4321|02/27/2016|UOIP|10/26/2016|
Looking for a way to change mm/dd/yyyy format to be changed to yyyy-mm-dd
4 Answers
Use the following approach with strptime and strftime functions from datetime module:
import datetime
# while iterating through the lines with a given format
# ...
line = 'ABC|1234|10/26/2016|PQRS|02/27/2016|'
line = '|'.join([item if k not in [2,4] else datetime.datetime.strptime(item, '%m/%d/%Y').strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
for k, item in enumerate(line.split('|'))])
print(line)
The output(for exemplary line):
ABC|1234|2016-10-26|PQRS|2016-02-27|
https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior
1 Comment
RomanPerekhrest
@Kshitij, as for your claim : at first, you have changed the initial format, secondly - it works fine and gives the output
1111222|2016-10-26|8888-12-31|ABCD0007|ABCDEFGH|. Check your code for errorsProbably not the cleanest way to do it, but you can try the following:
my_string = "ABC|1234|10/26/2016|PQRS|02/27/2016|"
#Split the string with the '|' character and return a list.
string_elements=my_string.split('|')
#The item 2 of the list (which is the first date) is split according to the '/' character
string_elements[2]=string_elements[2].split('/')
#The item 2 is transformed by making a rotation of the element to have the format yyyy-mm-dd and is joined on the character '-'
string_elements[2]='-'.join(string_elements[2][-1:] + string_elements[2][:-1])
#Same as above for teh item 4 which is the second date
string_elements[4]=string_elements[4].split('/')
string_elements[4]='-'.join(string_elements[4][-1:] + string_elements[4][:-1])
#The list of item is joined with the '|' character to reform a string
my_transformed_string='|'.join(string_elements)
print my_transformed_string
The result is:
ABC|1234|2016-10-26|PQRS|2016-02-27|
Comments
Without using any fancy trick, you can achieve it just by using str.split() as:
>>> my_string = "ABC|1234|10/26/2016|PQRS|02/27/2016|"
>>> mm, dd, yy = my_string.split("|")[2].split("/")
>>> print "{}-{}-{}".format(yy, mm, dd)
2016-10-26
answered Oct 26, 2016 at 12:12
Moinuddin Quadri
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1 Comment
kpratihast
How to change the older date format with the new format for all the occurrences of date values in a row?
You could also do a regex replacement:
import re
string = """ABC|1234|10/26/2016|PQRS|02/27/2016|
GHI|4321|02/27/2016|UOIP|10/26/2016|"""
dates = re.sub('(\d{1,2})/(\d{1,2})/(\d{4})', '\g<3>/\g<1>/\g<2>', string)
print dates
\n) between the lines?