matching of dates using regex pattern

Question

I was trying to match a date pattern 25.8.2020 using regex pattern. I used [\d]{1,2}.[\d]{1,2}.[\d]{4} for matching this. But the problem is that if there are some sequence like 454.9451, 2021-2022 etc they are also getting matched. How can i write a regex pattern for matching exactly only dd.mm.yyyy format

Tim Biegeleisen · Accepted Answer · 2021-09-06 05:40:41Z

3

I would suggest using strptime to validate the date string in your expected format:

def validate(date_text):
    try:
        datetime.datetime.strptime(date_text, '%d.%m.%Y')
    except ValueError:
        raise ValueError("invalid date string " + date_text)

inp = ['25.8.2020', '2020-12-31']
for i in inp:
    validate(i)

This prints:

ValueError: invalid date string 2020-12-31

The potential advantage of using strptime over a pure regex is that the latter might also admit strings which match the pattern but are invalid dates. For example, the pattern \d{2}\.\d{2}\.\d{4} by itself would allow for dates such as 30.02.2021, which don't really exist.

edited Sep 6, 2021 at 5:40

answered Sep 6, 2021 at 5:31

Tim Biegeleisen

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Thai Do · Accepted Answer · 2021-09-06 05:36:50Z

0

Try this: [0-3]*\d\.[01]*\d\.\d{4} Using \. instead .

Example: regex101

answered Sep 6, 2021 at 5:36

Thai Do

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