Converting string into datetime

Posted By: Oli

I’ve got a huge list of date-times like this as strings:

Jun 1 2005  1:33PM
Aug 28 1999 12:00AM

I’m going to be shoving these back into proper datetime fields in a database so I need to magic them into real datetime objects.

This is going through Django’s ORM so I can’t use SQL to do the conversion on insert.

Solution

datetime.strptime is the main routine for parsing strings into datetimes. It can handle all sorts of formats, with the format determined by a format string you give it:

from datetime import datetime

datetime_object = datetime.strptime('Jun 1 2005  1:33PM', '%b %d %Y %I:%M%p')

The resulting datetime object is timezone-naive.

Links:

• Python documentation for strptime: Python 2, Python 3

• Python documentation for strptime/strftime format strings: Python 2, Python 3

• strftime.org is also a really nice reference for strftime

Notes:

• strptime = “string parse time”
• strftime = “string format time”
• Pronounce it out loud today & you won’t have to search for it again in 6 months.

Answered By: Patrick Harrington

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