Python dateutil.parser.parse parses month first, not day

python parsing datetime format python-dateutil
Timo002 picture Timo002 · Jan 6, 2015 · Viewed 35.7k times · Source

I'm using dateutil.parser.parse to format a date from a string. But now it mixes up the month and the day.

I have a string that contains 05.01.2015. After

dateutil.parser.parse("05.01.2015")

it returns:

datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 1, 0, 0)

I hoped the it would return (2015, 1, 5, 0, 0)

How can I tell the code that the format is dd.mm.yyyy?

For the record, 25.01.2015 will be parsed as (2015, 1, 25, 0, 0), as expected.

Answer

Alex Riley picture Alex Riley · Jan 6, 2015

Specify dayfirst=True:

>>> dateutil.parser.parse("05.01.2015", dayfirst=True)
datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 5, 0, 0)

This gives precedence to the DD-MM-YYYY format instead of MM-DD-YYYY in cases where the date format is ambiguous (e.g. when the day is 12 or lower). The function is documented here.

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