Error while parsing string to date with dateutil.parser

Question

I am getting an error while trying to parse a string to date.

ValueError: unknown string format

Here is my code

dateString = "02/11/2016"
 print dateString
 dt = parse(dateString)
 item.date = calendar.timegm(dt.utctimetuple())
 print dt

The funny part is, it is printing the correct date before throwing the error. Here is the complete log

02/11/2016 2016-02-11 00:00:00 art. 10, comma 1, lettera e Traceback (most recent call last): File "institutional-docs.py", line 60, in dt = parse(dateString) File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/dateutil/parser.py", line 697, in parse return DEFAULTPARSER.parse(timestr, **kwargs) File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/dateutil/parser.py", line 303, in parse raise ValueError, "unknown string format" ValueError: unknown string format

Seems strange it works for me. Did you cut and paste the code from an example? The only thing that I can think of is that maybe there is some type of hidden character in the string. — aquil.abdullah
– aquil.abdullah, Commented Nov 3, 2016 at 11:54
@aquil.abdullah the data that I am using is coming from a scrapped data. I am escaping the unicode characters. This is what I am doing to ignore them unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', dateString).encode('ascii','ignore') — Kanishka
– Kanishka, Commented Nov 3, 2016 at 12:11
The easiest way to see if you have any hidden characters left in the string would be to log the results of print repr(dateString) — aquil.abdullah
– aquil.abdullah, Commented Nov 3, 2016 at 12:45
@aquil.abdullah Its printing '2 nov 2016' . Can you please tell me how I can remove them? I just started with python — Kanishka
– Kanishka, Commented Nov 3, 2016 at 13:19

Tom · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-03 12:03:28Z

1

What's wrong with using time?

your question doesn't specify what your parse function does so can't say if that's reading the string in any weird way. Chances are you've copied and pasted bad quotation marks.

import time
time.strptime("02/11/2016", "%d/%m/%Y")

answered Nov 3, 2016 at 12:03

Tom

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10 Comments

Kanishka Over a year ago

The string that I have is in the format "2 nov 2016". Don't think time can handle that conversion :/

Tom Over a year ago

"%d %b %Y" read the time module. you'll be surprised at how many things it can handle

Kanishka Over a year ago

Will give it a try. Thanks a lot

Tom Over a year ago

the codes are all listed docs.python.org/2/library/time.html#time.strftime and you can just define a date format that suits your needs.

Kanishka Over a year ago

I think its cause of some hidden characters in the string. I am using a scrapped data for the conversion. May be thats got something to do with it.

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