Using datetime.strptime to get date from string using python

Question

i have a bunch of strings like this: s = 3851102123

objective would be to extract the date from it in example:
85 is year
11 is month
02 is day

basically string indexes 1,2 = year, 3,4 = month, 5,6 = day
rest can be discarded, this is what i came up with:

>> x = datetime.strptime("3851102123", ??)

How would one extract the proper indexes?

Should i use regular expressions inside the parentheses to get the date out and then reformat the string ?

Output should like this:

>> 02.11.1985

AlvaroGMJ · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-27 21:31:16Z

1

I am not sure if you can do it like that, as strptime will expect a format string and the format string does not allow for variable fields (as you'll need if you want the format to ignore the first number of the string)

You could do something like this: datetime.strptime(the_string[1:7], "%y%m%d").strftime("%d.%m.%Y")

but maybe substrings or regular expressions would be faster.

answered May 27, 2011 at 21:31

AlvaroGMJ

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4 Comments

Larry Over a year ago

although, how would one check if the string inside the datetime is in the correct format ? For example that the month is not "31" and is indeed between 1-12.Found another batch of strings wrongly formated and they break the code :(

AlvaroGMJ Over a year ago

I don't know exactly what would happen if the string is unparseable, I believe a ValueError may be thrown. It will not just pass along as the datetime object have defined ranges of valid values. Can you give an example of the wrongly formatted strings? Check here for details: docs.python.org/library/datetime.html

Larry Over a year ago

datetime.strptime("3057102123"[1:7], "%y%m%d") outputs ValueError: unconverted data remains since the month is "71",

Larry Over a year ago

go it fixed using exception handling,code: try: (code), except ValueError

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