Converting string into datetime

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.