Question

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Parse date and format it using python?

I’m very new to Python. I have the following two strings :

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:07 GMT
2012-10-29 12:57:08

I wish there could be any date parsing lib available in python which does parse the above two strings to something like this:

2012-10-29 12:57:08

So that I can compare them. Note that the comparison should be able to produce the result like integer comparison. Like 1 is less than 2, so the same way 2012-10-29 12:57:08 is less than 2012-10-29 13:57:08

Are there any easy to do so in python?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Use the dateutil module for general date parsing:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse('Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:07 GMT')
datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 29, 13, 7, 7, tzinfo=tzutc())
>>> parse('2012-10-29 12:57:08')
datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 29, 12, 57, 8)

datetime.datetime objects can be compared in various ways.

If you know the exact format of each date string to be parsed, you can also do the parsing more explicitly using the datetime.datetime.strptime() method:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.strptime('Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:07:07 GMT', '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')
datetime.datetime(2012, 10, 29, 13, 7, 7)

Note however that that method ignores timezones!