Question

I have Linux/Unix syslog file and I want to separate the date and the time into variables. How can I achieve it in python?

Here’s the log format:

Feb 26 14:20:04 laptop kernel: [19.392640] ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team

I want to put Feb in a variable and the same goes to the day (26), time (14:20:04), etc.

In shell scripting, I can do it by cut -d " " -f 1-4 where " " is the delimiter and 1-4 is the field number.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you’re just wanting to emulate cut, you can split on space and take entries 1-4.

>>> logline = 'Feb 26 14:20:04 laptop kernel: [19.392640] ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team'
>>> logline.split(' ')[0:4]
['Feb', '26', '14:20:04', 'laptop']

(Did you want just the first 3 fields instead?)

You could also use regex, but I don’t think it’s necessary in this case.