Python date string to date object

import datetime
datetime.datetime.strptime('24052010', '%d%m%Y').date()

Directly related question:

What if you have

datetime.datetime.strptime("2015-02-24T13:00:00-08:00", "%Y-%B-%dT%H:%M:%S-%H:%M").date()

and you get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 308, in _strptime
    format_regex = _TimeRE_cache.compile(format)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 265, in compile
    return re_compile(self.pattern(format), IGNORECASE)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 194, in compile
    return _compile(pattern, flags)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 251, in _compile
    raise error, v # invalid expression
sre_constants.error: redefinition of group name 'H' as group 7; was group 4

and you tried:

<-24T13:00:00-08:00", "%Y-%B-%dT%HH:%MM:%SS-%HH:%MM").date()

but you still get the traceback above.

Answer:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> parse("2015-02-24T13:00:00-08:00")
datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 24, 13, 0, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -28800))

Use time module to convert data.

Code snippet:

import time 
tring='20150103040500'
var = int(time.mktime(time.strptime(tring, '%Y%m%d%H%M%S')))
print var

There is another library called arrow really great to make manipulation on python date.

import arrow
import datetime

a = arrow.get('24052010', 'DMYYYY').date()
print(isinstance(a, datetime.date)) # True

you have a date string like this, “24052010” and you want date object for this,

from datetime import datetime
cus_date = datetime.strptime("24052010", "%d%m%Y").date()

this cus_date will give you date object.

you can retrieve date string from your date object using this,

cus_date.strftime("%d%m%Y")

If you are lazy and don’t want to fight with string literals, you can just go with the parser module.

from dateutil import parser
dt = parser.parse("Jun 1 2005  1:33PM")
print(dt.year, dt.month, dt.day,dt.hour, dt.minute, dt.second)
>2005 6 1 13 33 0

Just a side note, as we are trying to match any string representation, it is 10x slower than strptime

For single value the datetime.strptime method is the fastest

import arrow
from datetime import datetime
import pandas as pd

l = ['24052010']

%timeit _ = list(map(lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%d%m%Y').date(), l))
6.86 µs ± 56.5 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)

%timeit _ = list(map(lambda x: x.date(), pd.to_datetime(l, format='%d%m%Y')))
305 µs ± 6.32 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

%timeit _ = list(map(lambda x: arrow.get(x, 'DMYYYY').date(), l))
46 µs ± 978 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)

For a list of values the pandas pd.to_datetime is the fastest

l = ['24052010'] * 1000

%timeit _ = list(map(lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%d%m%Y').date(), l))
6.32 ms ± 89.6 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

%timeit _ = list(map(lambda x: x.date(), pd.to_datetime(l, format='%d%m%Y')))
1.76 ms ± 27.3 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

%timeit _ = list(map(lambda x: arrow.get(x, 'DMYYYY').date(), l))
44.5 ms ± 522 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10 loops each)

For ISO8601 datetime format the ciso8601 is a rocket

import ciso8601

l = ['2010-05-24'] * 1000

%timeit _ = list(map(lambda x: ciso8601.parse_datetime(x).date(), l))
241 µs ± 3.24 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

string "24052010"
In a very manual way you could just go like this:-
first split the string as (yyyy-mm-dd) format so you could get a tuple something like this (2010, 5, 24), then simply convert this tuple to a date format something like 2010-05-24.

you could run this code on a list of string object similar to above and convert the entire list of tuples object to date object by simply unpacking(*tuple) check the code below.

import datetime
#for single string simply use:-

my_str= "24052010"
date_tup = (int(my_str[4:]),int(my_str[2:4]),int(my_str[:2]))
print(datetime.datetime(*date_tup))

output: 2012-01-01 00:00:00 

# for a list of string date objects you could use below code.
date_list = []
str_date = ["24052010", "25082011", "25122011","01012012"]

for items in str_date:
    date_list.append((int(items[4:]),int(items[2:4]),int(items[:2])))

for dates in date_list:
    # unpack all tuple objects and convert to date
    print(datetime.datetime(*dates))

output:
2010-05-24 00:00:00
2011-08-25 00:00:00
2011-12-25 00:00:00
2012-01-01 00:00:00