Question

I’m scraping a a page that includes among other things, date information. So I have a variable named warrant_issued that contains u'11/5/2003' — I want to store this as a machine readable date. PHP has a handy strtotime function that works fabulously. I was hoping that datetime‘s strptime would help me but it doesn’t seem to be available in my version of datetime — here is everything in my tab complete on datetime.

In [231]: datetime.
datetime.MAXYEAR           datetime.__hash__          datetime.__sizeof__
datetime.MINYEAR           datetime.__init__          datetime.__str__
datetime.__class__         datetime.__name__          datetime.__subclasshook__
datetime.__delattr__       datetime.__new__           datetime.date
datetime.__dict__          datetime.__package__       datetime.datetime
datetime.__doc__           datetime.__reduce__        datetime.datetime_CAPI
datetime.__file__          datetime.__reduce_ex__     datetime.time
datetime.__format__        datetime.__repr__          datetime.timedelta
datetime.__getattribute__  datetime.__setattr__       datetime.tzinfo

I’m using iPython 2.7.2+

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? What’s the best way to turn u'11/5/2003' into a date?

Answer 1

strptime() is definitely the right approach, it’s just a class method for the datetime class (confusingly part of the datetime module).

That is, datetime.datetime.strptime() is what you’re looking for (and not datetime.strptime().