Question

I need to match dates in form:

January 10, 2012

And replace in form:

10 January 2012

Here is what I have so far:

        pattern = re.findall(r'(?:January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December)\s\d\d,\s\d{4}', text)
        print pattern

How do i replace?

Answer 1

Use strptime() to parse the date and strftime() to generate the new string. There is no reason to use a regex in this case.

In [1]: import time
In [2]: tm = time.strptime('January 10, 2012', '%B %d, %Y')
In [3]: time.strftime('%d %B %Y', tm)
Out[4]: '10 January 2012'