Convert a string with date and time to a date [duplicate]

Question

I've got this date time string:

post["date"] = "2007-07-18 10:03:19"

I'd like to extract just "2007-07-18" as a date. I've seen some reference to strptime but I'm not sure how to use it. How can I extract the date from this string?

Answer 1

The other two answers are fine, but if you actually want the date for something else, you can use the datetime module:

from datetime import datetime d = datetime.strptime('2007-07-18 10:03:19', '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') day_string = d.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') 

It might be overkill for now, but it'll come in useful. You can see all of the format specifiers here.

Answer 2

In your case, just use split:

>>> d1="2007-07-18 10:03:19" >>> d1.split()[0] '2007-07-18' >>>  

(The 1st part after splitting with whitespace)

If you insist on using strptime, the format is "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" :

>>> import time >>> time.strptime(d1,"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") time.struct_time(tm_year=2007, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=10, tm_min=3, tm_sec=19, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=199, tm_isdst=-1) >>> time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d", _) '2007-07-18' >>>  

Answer 3

You can use https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-dateutil which can support any datetime format e.g:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> d1="2007-07-18 10:03:19"
>>> date_obj = parse(d1)
>>> date_obj
datetime.datetime(2007, 7, 18, 10, 3, 19)
>>> date_obj.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
'2007-07-18'
>>> d2 = "18-07-2007 10:03:19"
>>> d = parse(d2)
>>> d
datetime.datetime(2007, 7, 18, 10, 3, 19)
>>> d.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
'2007-07-18'